enter these rooms. Will you please
tell the boy that these are my orders--that Hugh Gordon must be put
out at once if he attempts to come inside my door again."

Henrietta noticed that the architect took the letter she gave him with
a hand that trembled slightly, cast at it a single frowning, hostile
glance and hastily but carefully put it away in his breast pocket. She
remembered that just so had he looked at the previous letter from
Gordon, and with just the same angry care had put it away unopened.

In that inner pocket it remained untouched, just as had the former
one, by turns searing his very heart with impotent anger and chilling
it with fear, until a late hour of the night, when he sat alone before
his library fire. Then, at last, with the look and manner of a man
forced to touch a loathed object, he took it out and opened it.

"Felix Brand, I have come to a decision," the letter
abruptly began. "It must be either you or I. Until lately I
thought there might be room for us both. But there isn't. If
you had paid any attention to what I told you before, had
shown any remorse for the evil you have done, or any
intention of reforming your conduct, I might have come to a
different conclusion. I will say more than that. If you had
felt in your soul the desire to get yourself together and be
a real man instead of a source of pollution, and had shown
in your thoughts and actions the willingness and the ability
to try to make yourself over, I would have recognized your
right to live.

"In that case, I would have gone, perhaps not willingly, but
feeling it right to go, back to where I came from, and I
would have let you alone. At least, I would have tried to do
that, because I give you full credit for your genius, of
which I have none, and know its value to the world. But I
might not have succeeded. For I have tasted life and found
it good and the desire to live, the will to live, is so
strong within me that it might have been stronger than the
sense of my duty, of your right, or anything else.

"But it is useless to speculate about that, because you grow
worse instead of better. You are like one of those people
who, apparently unharmed themselves, carry about with them
the germs of typhoid and scatter destruction wherever they
go. The sooner the world is rid of you the better for it,