nd drew himself to his full height, and spread his
bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
triumphant glow.

"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis. "My dear Louisa, I'm not
the sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall
break them!"

He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender,
excitedly telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over
his shoulder; again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the
meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to
realize that he was her brother.

Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings
in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before.
Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a
new thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related
them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and
malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a
hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch
Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were
yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled
him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden
consummation. In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. There
had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell,
in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the
first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune
seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him
false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the
temptation of profitable treason.

But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
another. It did not surprise his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly
attract her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the wage-earning
sort. Ap