, I expect!"

"Do you quarrel with it? If this was all yours, would you give it up?"

"Not without a fight!" she laughed. "_Per Ensem Justitia!_" She waved
the blade.

Harry left her busy with the things that were so great a delight and
walked to the window at the other end of the long room. Thence he
watched, now her, now the clouds that lounged off and on to the moon's
disk. More and more, though, his eyes were caught by her and glued to
her; she was the centre of the room; it seemed all made and prepared for
her even as it had seemed for Addie Tristram. The motto ran in his
head--_Per Ensem Justitia_. What was the justice and what the sword? He
awoke to the cause of the changed mood in him and of the agitation in
which he had been living. It was nothing to defy the law, to make light
of a dry abstraction, to find right against it in his blood. His
opponent now was no more the law, it was no more even some tiresome,
unknown, unrealized girl in London, with surroundings most unpicturesque
and associations that had no power to touch his heart. Here was the
enemy, this creature whose every movement claimed the blood that was
hers, whose coming repaired the loss Blent had suffered in losing Addie
Tristram, whose presence crowned its charms with a new glory. Nature
that fashioned her in the Tristram image--had it not put in her hand the
sword by which she should win justice? The thought passed through his
mind now without a shock; he seemed to see her mistress of Blent; for
the moment he forgot himself as anyone save an onlooker; he did not seem
concerned.

Once more he roused himself. He had fallen into a fear of the fancies
that threatened to carry him he did not know where. He wanted to get
away from this room with its suggestions, and from the presence that
gave them such force.

"Aren't you ready yet?" he called to her. "It's getting late."

"Are you still there?" she cried back in a gay affectation of surprise.
"I'd forgotten all about you, I thought I had it to myself. I was trying
to think it was all mine."

"Shall we go downstairs?" His voice was hard and constrained.

"No, I won't," she said squarely. "I can't go. It's barely ten o'clock.
Come, we'll talk here. You smoke--or is that high treason?--and I'll sit
here." She threw herself into Addie Tristram's great chair. There was a
triumphant gayety in her air that spoke of her joy in all about her, of
her sense of the boundless satisfaction that her surr