almost majestically, he folded his arms over
his breast, but there was a menacing glitter in his eyes as he
confronted his victim.

XXX

Silently the two men faced each other. Then Ernest hissed:

"Thief!"

Reginald shrugged his shoulders.

"Vampire!"

"So Ethel has infected you with her absurd fancies! Poor boy! I am
afraid.... I have been wanting to tell you for some time.... But I
think... We have reached the parting of our road!"

"And that you dare to tell me!"

The more he raged, the calmer Reginald seemed to become.

"Really," he said, "I fail to understand.... I must ask you to leave my
room!"

"You fail to understand? You cad!" Ernest cried. He stepped to the
writing-table and opened the secret drawer with a blow. A bundle of
manuscripts fell on the floor with a strange rustling noise. Then,
seizing his own story, he hurled it upon the table. And behold--the last
pages bore corrections in ink that could have been made only a few
minutes ago!

Reginald smiled. "Have you come to play havoc with my manuscripts?" he
remarked.

"Your manuscripts? Reginald Clarke, you are an impudent impostor! You
have written no word that is your own. You are an embezzler of the mind,
strutting through life in borrowed and stolen plumes!"

And at once the mask fell from Reginald's face.

"Why stolen?" he coolly said, with a slight touch of irritation. "I
absorb. I appropriate. That is the most any artist can say for himself.
God creates; man moulds. He gives us the colours; we mix them."

"That is not the question. I charge you with having wilfully and
criminally interfered in my life; I charge you with having robbed me of
what was mine; I charge you with being utterly vile and rapacious, a
hypocrite and a parasite!"

"Foolish boy," Reginald rejoined austerely. "It is through me that the
best in you shall survive, even as the obscure Elizabethans live in him
of Avon. Shakespeare absorbed what was great in little men--a greatness
that otherwise would have perished--and gave it a setting, a life."

"A thief may plead the same. I understand you better. It is your
inordinate vanity that prompts you to abuse your monstrous power."

"You err. Self-love has never entered into my actions. I am careless of
personal fame. Look at me, boy! As I stand before you I am Homer, I am
Shakespeare ... I am every cosmic manifestation in art. Men have doubted
in each incarnation my individual existence. Historians have m