to my brother."

"I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money."

The hunchback was undisturbed.

"It was a family matter and not likely to be known."

"I see it," said my father. "It was managed in your legal manner and
with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the
impression to go out that your brother had already received his share
in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there
remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under
the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother
David."

"Or rather," replied the hunchback calmly, "to state the thing
correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered
personal property with me." Then he added: "I gave my brother David a
hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and
took possession of the house and lands."

"And after that," said my father, "what happened?"

The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter
laugh.

"After that," he answered, "we saw the real man in my brother David, as
my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned
thief and fugitive."

At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood
beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness.
The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the
world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face.
My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech.
But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.

"He has gone so far," she said, "let him go on to the end. Let him omit
no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say."

Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He
passed the girl and addressed my father.

"You will recall the details of that robbery," he said in his
complacent, piping voice. "My brother David had married a wife, like the
guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived
with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow
money."

He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and
across the hall.

"It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to
put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He
did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up