ing, that he also sprang to his
feet. "You scoundrel!" Asgill repeated, choking on the words. "If you
say a thing like that again--if you say it again, do you hear?--I'll do
you a mischief. Do you hear? Do you hear?"

"What in the saints' names is the matter with you?" The McMurrough
faltered.

"You're not fit to breathe the air she breathes!" Asgill continued,
with the same ferocity. "Nor am I! But I know it, thank God! And you
don't! Why, man," he continued, still fighting with the passion that
possessed him, "I wouldn't dare to touch the hem of her gown without
her leave! I wouldn't dare to look in her face if she bade me not!
She's as safe with me as if she were an angel in heaven! And you
say--you; but you don't understand!"

"Faith and I don't," The McMurrough answered, his tone much lowered.
"That's true for you!" When it came to a collision of wills the other
was his master.

"No," Asgill repeated. "But don't you talk like that again, or harm
will come of it. I may be what you say--I may be! But I wouldn't lay a
finger on your sister against her will--no, not to be in Paradise!"

"I thought you didn't believe in Paradise," the younger man muttered
sulkily, striving to cover the check he had received.

"There's a Paradise I do believe in," Asgill answered. "But never mind
that." He sat down again.

Strange to relate, he meant what he said. Many changes corrupt loyalty,
and of evil times evil men are the natural fruit. In nearly all
respects Asgill was as unscrupulous a man as the time in which he lived
and the class from which he sprang could show. Following in the steps
of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by
oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong.
And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand
as hard. But he loved; and--strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it
what you will--somewhere in the depths of his earthly nature a spark of
good survived, and fired him with so pure an ardour that at the least
hint of disrespect to his mistress, at a thought of injury to her, the
whole man rose in arms. It was a strange, yet a common inconsistency;
an inconstancy to evil odd enough to set The McMurrough marvelling,
while common enough to commend itself to a thinking mind.

"Enough of that!" Asgill repeated after a moment's pause. While he did
not fear, it did not suit him to break with his companion. "And,
indeed, it was not o