ly
legal!"

The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.

"It is a strange world," he said.

"It is," replied my father. "It is profoundly, inconceivably strange."

There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across
the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back
her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow
of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her
blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the
tragedies that might lie within it calmly.

Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of
the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient
make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the
four candles on the table.

"It was strange," continued my father over the long pause, "that your
father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre
to your brother David."

"Not strange," replied the hunchback, "when you consider what my brother
David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what
the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places
of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave
the lands to me?"

"It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your
control."

"Under my care," cried the hunchback. "I will plead guilty, if you like,
to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness,
while my brother went about the pleasures of his life."

"But the testament," said my father, "was in strange terms. It
bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property,
as though these lands were all the estate your father had."

"And so they were," replied the hunchback calmly. "The lands had been
stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar
in hand or debt owing to my father before his death." The man paused
and put the tips of his fingers together. "My father had given to my
brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he
justly left me the lands to make us even."

"Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you,
Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land."

"I conducted my father's business," said the hunchback, "for him, since
he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he
gave them