own at
him--Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body:
and _she_ what she was--she fell into one of those futile and
dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled
with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head,
and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.

The pity died out of Jelnik's face. He regarded her with his
father's eyes, the calm, impersonal, passionless gaze of the trained
alienist. She was an unlovely exhibition, to be studied critically.
In some subtle manner she understood, for she jerked herself out of
her anger, and fell silent, regarding him with a glance as
brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula's. The cold, relentless
hate of that glance chilled him. He forced himself to bow to her
again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to
take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples.

The next morning a bailiff presented Mr. Nicholas Jelnik with a
notice forbidding him to enter the grounds of Hynds House without
the written permission of the owner, and threatening prosecution
should he disobey.

"The Hyndses, as I have said, are good haters," finished Judge
Gatchell.

"And so she left Hynds House to me," said I without, I am afraid,
much gratitude.

"It was hers, to dispose of as she chose." The lawyer spoke crisply.
"If you have any scruples, dismiss them. My late client understood
that it was far better for the estate to fall into the hands of a
sensible woman like yourself than into the keeping of a young man
with what foolish people like to call the artistic temperament,
which in plain English means a person who can't earn his salt in any
useful, sensible business.

"You doubt this? Let us consider this same artistic temperament and
its results," continued the judge, making a wry face. "Once or twice
it has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in
mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at
all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that
the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved
over him. His laundress and his landlady had good cause to rave!

"He wrote, too. A text-book, a title, a will, a deed, a business
letter? Far from it! He wrote _poetry_, if you please! The little
wretch wrote _poetry_! That's what the artistic temperament leads a
man to! Bah! I hate, I despise, I abhor, the artistic