word."

"Ye don't look like that"--with disappointment.

"Look like what?"--fiercely--"What would you have me look like? My
father was as good-looking a man as you'd see in the three kingdoms, and
as good a butcher, too. He got rich, had three shops, and he sent us
boys to the best school he could find. He'd have set me up in any
business I liked; if I chose his it was because--I did choose it."

He was annoyed at Bates's open regret, just as we are constantly more
annoyed at fresh evidence of a spirit we know to be in a man than with
the demonstration of some unexpected fault, because we realise the trait
we have fathomed and see how poor it is.

"How did your brother come to be a minister?"

"He's a _clergyman_ of the Church of England"--with loftiness.

"Well, that's more of a thing than a minister; how did he come by it?"

"He was clever, and father was able to send him to Oxford. He was a good
deal older than I was. I suppose he took to the Church because he
thought it his duty."

"And now that he's out here he wants to sink the shop?"

"Oh, as to that"--coldly--"when he was quite young, in England, he got
in with swells. He's tremendously clever. There were men in England that
thought no end of him."

"Did he lie low about the shop there?"

"I don't know"--shortly--"I was at school then."

Bates, perceiving that his questions were considered vastly offensive,
desisted, but not with that respectfulness of mind that he would have
had had Alec's father been a clergyman as well as his brother. Bates's
feeling in this matter was what it was by inheritance, exactly as was
the shape of his nose or the length of his limbs; it required no
exercise of thought on his part to relegate Alec Trenholme to a place of
less consequence.

Trenholme assuaged his own ill-temper by going to take out his pink and
grey grosbeaks and give them exercise. He was debating in his mind
whether they were suffering from confinement or not--a question which
the deportment of the birds never enabled him to solve completely--when
Bates wandered round beside him again, and betrayed that his mind was
still upon the subject of their conversation.

"Ye know," he began, with the deliberate interest of a Scotchman in an
argument, "I've been thinking on it, and I'm thinking your brother's in
the right of it."

"You do!" The words had thunderous suggestion of rising wrath.

"Well," said the other again, "ye're hard to please; ye were ve