fore some ominous
tribunal. The sensation--it was more that than anything else--caused the
elder brother to withdraw into the depths of the library, where he
turned on a light.

The room, with its bare floors, its shrouded furniture, its screened
book cases, its blank pictures swaddled in linen bags, its long, gaunt
shadows, and its deadened air, suggested itself horribly and
ridiculously as a fitting scene for a crime. He might kill Claude with a
blow, and if he turned out the lights and shut the door and stole back
to his hotel no one would ever suspect him as the murderer. The idea
would have been no more than grotesque had it not acquired a certain
terror from the mingling of affection and anger and pity in his heart at
the sound of Claude's shrinking, clanking advance. In proportion as
Claude seemed to be afraid of him, he was the more aware that he was a
man to be afraid of. The consciousness caused him to get deeper into the
dimly lighted room, taking his stand at the remotest possible spot, with
his back to the empty fireplace.

But when Claude appeared coatless in the doorway, his head was thrown up
defiantly in apparent effort to treat Thor's entrance as unwarranted.
"What the devil are you doing here?"

Because of the semi-obscurity his face was white with a whiteness that
quickened Thor's sympathy into self-reproach.

"What are _you_ doing here?"

"That's my business." In making this reply Claude seemed to take it for
granted that they met on terms of hostility, though he added, less
aggressively: "If you want to know, I'm packing up. Taking the train for
New York at one o'clock to-night."

Thor endeavored to speak with casual fraternal interest. "What brought
you back?"

Claude took time to light a cigarette, saying, as he blew out the match,
"You."

"Me? I thought it might be--might be some one else."

"Then you thought wrong." He walked to a metal ash-tray which helped to
keep the covering that protected one of the low bookcases in its place,
and deposited the burnt match. He threw off with seeming carelessness as
he did so, "I know only one traitor, to make me keep returning on my
tracks."

Because the impulse to violence was so terrific, Thor braced himself
against it, standing with his feet planted apart and his hands clenched
behind him till the nails dug into the flesh. He could not, however,
restrain a scornful little grunt which was meant for laughter. "_You_
talk of traitors! I'd kee