ardes had not moved. He was still white with anger, but the
tempest that had brought his eruption of denunciation had passed, and he
gravely bowed his head in assent.

"Very well. We seem to hold standards of conduct irreconcilably
divergent. To my thinking you are a self-righteous and tedious dreamer
and an impertinent preacher."

Edwardes nodded and his answer was composed. "We are all dreamers of
varied sorts. You are yourself the mightiest of dreamers: because you
make your visions realities. Paul is a lesser dreamer--almost a
sleep-walker through life. As for Mary--" his voice grew suddenly
tender--"why, I first saw her in the sun and dust of a mountain
roadside, dreaming of fairy princes. I come last, but I'm a dreamer,
too. All my visions are simple, but I've tried to keep them compatible
with honest ideals."

"At least, you have hardly succeeded in keeping them to yourself."
Hamilton Burton's voice was still controlled, but it was witheringly
bitter. "Let me make myself clear. In an unhappy marriage I see a fact
where you see a gauzy sacrament. I have become what I am, because to me
the broad canvas alone is interesting, and picayunish prejudices are
contemptible. You bring into my house a visage of disapproval, and when
you overhear private talk permit yourself to sneer. It is intolerable."

There was such a ring of sincerity in the voicing of this distorted
reasoning that Edwardes almost smiled.

"And yet," he answered, "until questioned I said nothing when I heard
you offering to buy, as your brother's plaything, the wife of another
man--a man who has served you with loyalty."

"You sneered. You allowed your sanctimonious lips to curl. Had you
dared, you would have rebuked me out of your cramped virtue."

"Dared!" Once more Edwardes found his words leaping in fierce and
uncontrolled anger. His hand had been almost drawn back to strike the
man who stood there treating him as an emperor might have treated a
corporal, but as the curb slipped from his cruelly reined temper, he
felt the girl's hand on his arm, and stepped back, with every muscle in
his body cramped under the tensity of his effort. Yet his words were
hardly less an assault than blows.

"Had I dared!" he laughed ironically. "I dare to tell you now to your
face what all men say of you in your absence. They believe you to
be--and rightly--a conscienceless pirate. You are a scathe and a blight;
a pestilential ogre, drunk with self-worship. Whe