on and lit up the spectacle of the room. At sight of it he could
have laughed. Nothing but the big library table and one of the heavy
arm-chairs stood on its legs. One of the windows had a gash like a grin
on its prim countenance, and one of the pictures sagged drunkenly from
its hook, a mere bag of gilded wood and glass. Cowering in a corner,
Claude was again arming himself with a chair. It was not his weapon, but
his whiteness, that stirred Thor to a pity almost hysterical. One of his
arms was bare where the shirt-sleeve had been torn from it; one side of
his collar sprang loose where it had been wrested from the stud; his
lips were parted in terror, his eyes starting from his head. The thing
Thor could have done more easily than anything else would have been to
fling himself down and weep.

As it was, he could only hold out his hands with a kind of shamed,
broken-hearted appeal, saving, "Claude, come here."

Though his trembling hands dropped the raised chair, Claude shrank more
desperately into his corner. When, to reassure him, Thor took a step
forward, Claude moved along the wall, with his back to that protection,
ready to spring and dodge again. If he understood Thor's advances, he
either mistrusted or rejected them.

"Don't be afraid," Thor tried to say, encouragingly, but after the
attacks of the past few minutes his voice sounded hollow and
unconvincing to himself.

In proportion as he went nearer Claude sidled away, always keeping his
back to the wall, with gasps that were like groans. He spoke but once.
"Open that door!" It was all he could articulate, but it implied a test
of the brother's sincerity.

Thor accepted it, striding to the threshold, turning the key
energetically, and flinging the door wide open. The quiet light burning
in the quiet hall produced something in the nature of a shock. He
stepped into the hall to wipe his brow and curse himself. He could never
win his own pardon for the madness of the past quarter of an hour.
Neither, probably, could he ever win Claude's, though he must go back
and make the attempt.

What happened as he turned again into the library he could never clearly
explain, for the reason that he never clearly knew. The minute remained
in his consciousness as one unrelated to the rest of life, with nothing
to lead up to it and nothing to follow after. Even the savagery of their
mutual onslaught had been no adequate preparation for what now took
place so rapidly that th