compelling, and there's that out-of-doors look in his eye, the look of
readiness and power. You know what that sort of strength means with the
pretty animals."

"You speak bitterly--but then, you've competed with that sort."

"My unhappy infant! You'd at least have found a barren sort of dignity
in actual competition. As it is----"

"You got her by a trick, I've heard, from the man who took her away from
you when she'd found you out."

"Tell that to your grandmother--it may help you out of some money."

"Stop it, governor! I'll quit if you will. Come!" He spoke with a drop
of the voice, and lifted a hand in appeal.

"When you like--I've wasted no words."

"It's true, all you've said? Grandmother knows?"

"Thirty seconds later and I'd have had to bless the pair."

"And now?"

"It's safe for the present. She forgot. She'll remember to-morrow. I'd
trust him back there then. She'd see only an obscene excrescence."

"It's a pleasant situation!"

"It's hellish! Can you imagine _my_ feelings? You've touched on them
with your graceful, filial banter."

"What will you do?"

"'What will you do?'" He mimicked the other with a snarl. "Well, I begin
by having him to dine. I study him, I win him. I have him now. He will
dine with me other times. I'm not so sure he won't come to reverence me.
Oh, it's an ideal situation! Damn it! How they fall! _We_ couldn't
contrive them half so cunningly. The fool hath said in his heart 'There
is no God'--a fool, indeed! There is a God, and He has a devil in Him,
or He couldn't have given me this to play out. I have him, I tell you,
her son and his son, think of it--her lover's son that they both
loved--served up to me!"

"What can you do with him?"

"_Do_ with him?" The elder man eyed his son for a long minute, then
dropped into a chair, and for an interval the young man pursued his
rather uncomfortable reflections in silence. At last he broke this with
another query. As there was no response, and his father's face was
turned away, he rose and sauntered in front of him. The eyes met his
musingly, and he saw that the mouth was fixed in a rather hideous
smile.

CHAPTER XVII

AN ELUSIVE VENUS

The days that followed were marked for Ewing with a puzzling
discouragement; puzzling, because there had been no failure. A failure
would have left him reliant, however battered, but nothing good had been
disproved. He was fighting some black doubt of himself, insidiously
nurs