oor girl into saying she was willing to marry
you--and then throwing the words in her teeth."

It was from the flame in Thor's eyes that Claude leaped back a
half-pace, though he steadied himself against a small table covered up
from the accumulation of summer's dust by a piece of common calico.
Giving himself time enough to have deliberately counted twenty, Thor
subdued the impulse of the muscles as well as that of speech. "Who told
you that?" he asked, at last, in the tone he might have used of some
matter of no importance.

"Who do you think?"

"There's only one person who _could_ have told you--"

"Oh, you admit as much as that, do you? There is a person who could have
told me?"

"Yes, I admit as much as that--but you must have misunderstood her."

Thor's dignity and self-restraint were not without an effect that might
eventually have made for peace had not the brother's conscience been
screaming for a scapegoat on which to lay a portion of his sins. For him
alone the entire weight had become intolerable. Thor had been known to
accept such vicarious burdens before now. In the hope that he would do
so again, Claude answered, tauntingly:

"I didn't misunderstand her when she said you were making me a cat's-paw
to do what you wouldn't do yourself. What kind of stuff are you made of,
Thor? You go flaunting your money before a poor little girl who you know
can't resist it, and then, when you get her willing to do God knows
what, you push her off on me and want to pay me for the job of relieving
you of your dirty work. After you've dragged her in the dust she's still
considered good enough for me--"

"Stop!"

The roar of the monosyllable echoed through the empty house, while Thor
strode forward, the devil in him loose. With the skill of a toreador in
throwing his cloak into the eyes of an infuriated bull, Claude snatched
the calico strip from the table beside which he stood and flung it in
Thor's face. The result was to check the latter in his advance, giving
Claude time to dart nimbly to the other side of the room. As Thor stared
about him, dazed by his rage, he bore out still further the resemblance
to a maddened animal in the bull-ring.

Fear struggled in Claude's heart with the lust for retaliation. Like
Thor himself, he knew the minute to be one in which he could work off a
thousand unpaid scores that had been heaping themselves up since
childhood. For the time being it seemed as if he could not only make