er was swallowed up for her
in the thought of how he had been struck down. But she could read nothing
in his face. He was simply gazing straight ahead, and looking _so_ like
his father at his most unfathomable. As soon as he had fully realized
what the will meant, his nerves had stopped feeling and his brain had
stopped thinking. Adelaide next noted Dory, and grew cold from head to
foot. All in a rush it came over her how much she had relied upon her
prospective inheritance, how little upon herself. What would Dory think
of her _now_? And Ross--what a triumph for him, what a narrow escape! Had
he suspected? Had others in the town known that of which they of the
family were in complete ignorance? Oh, the horror of the descent--the
horror of the rude snatching away of the golden aureole! "Father, father,
how could you do it? How could you hurt us so?" she muttered. Then, up
before her rose his face with that frightful look in the eyes. "But how
doing it made _him_ suffer!" she thought. And the memory of those hours
on hours she had spent with him, buried alive, flooded over her. "Doing
it killed him!" she said to herself.

She felt cruel fingers grinding into her arm. With a sharp cry she sprang
up. Her brother was facing her, his features ablaze with all the evil
passions in his untrained and unrestrained nature. "_You knew_!" he
hissed. "You traitor! You knew he was doing this. You honeyfugled him.
And you and Hargrave get it all!"

Adelaide shrank as she would not have shrunk under a lash.

"O Arthur! Arthur!" she cried, clasping her hands and stretching them
toward him.

"You admit it, do you?" he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders like a
madman. "Yes, your guilty face admits it. But I'll undo your work. I'll
break the will. Such an outrage as that, such a robbery, won't stand in
court for a minute."

Dory had risen, was moving to fling the brother from the sister; but Mrs.
Ranger was before him. Starting up from the stupor into which Judge
Torrey's explanation had thrown her, she thrust herself between her
children. "Arthur!" she said, and her voice was quiet and solemn. "Your
father is dead." She drew herself up, and facing her son in her widow's
black, seemed taller than he. "If I had needed any proof that he was
right about what he did with his own," she went on, "I'd have found it in
your face and in what you just said to your sister. Go to the glass
there, boy! Look at your face and remember your words!"