tory, the papers call a raid. Has it ever occurred to you, my dear
brother, that perhaps your dream is, after all, one of colossal
selfishness?"

The rippling ease of his muscles stiffened and his smile faded.

"Is it selfishness to give back to those one loves the things of which
life has robbed them?"

She shook her head. "No--but there is such a thing as suffocating the
souls in them with material kindness and bodily luxuries," she answered.

"You have been spending a great deal of time of late with Jefferson
Edwardes." The manner of the man underwent one of its swift changes and
grew cool and acid. "Perhaps he has been talking to you as he undertook
to talk to me last night."

A light as dominant as that in her brother's came to Mary Burton's
pupils.

"Perhaps," she replied.

"I'm not at all sure that I care for this intimate association with Mr.
Edwardes," he curtly announced. "I am not enamored of the vaporings of
visionary and self-ordained preachers."

"Possibly it is not necessary that you should be," the girl suggested.
"Maybe for the purpose of my own friendships, it is enough that I like
him. I hardly think you would understand his type, Hamilton."

Her brother's face reddened dangerously.

"I should call my intelligence human," he declared. "I've been able to
make certain use of it."

"Call it superhuman if you like--or inhuman, yet I hardly think it can
truly gage that type of gallant gentleman who has kept his dreams
untainted and his ideals clean."

The man who had found the world a thing upon which he could stamp his
hall-mark stood for a while without speaking; then his voice came keyed
to a satirical coldness.

"Whatever your estimate may be of my ability to understand this peerless
gentleman and chevalier, one thing I can do. I can crush him into pulp.
If he has poisoned against me the minds of my own family, I swear to
you that I both can and will nail him to the cross of utter ruin. You
had better warn your knightly friend, Mary, that the days of
grail-seeking are ended."

The girl came to her feet and her eyes were stars of scorn as she faced
the man whose sudden anger had brought out the arteries corded on his
temples.

"Such talk," she said, "belongs to the shambles of your cut-throat
finance. I have no wish to listen to it." Gradually the scornful light
in Mary's pupils hardened and brightened into the fighting fire that
might come into those of a tigress whose den has been