or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your
money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for
a brother!"

"Well, I'm damned!" was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this
outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. "Since
when have you been taken this way?" he asked at last, mechanically
jocular.

"That's all right," she declared with defensive inconsequence. "It's the
way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning."

He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for
demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked
about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was
to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he
had been conscious.

"How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from the
beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence. "You say I sit
on my money-bags and smile--you abuse me with doing no good with my
money--how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this
while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did
believe in me!"

She sniffed at him. "I don't believe in you now, at all events," she
said, bluntly.

He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. "Why, this very
day"--he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming
up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his
brain--"this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground
you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and
alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the
things they buy and the way they live--and thinking out my plans for
doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more
than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in,
actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's
own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the
rest of it--I must say, that's a bit rum."

Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected
to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown
with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after
some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to
avoid offense. "It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if
you're really occupying your mind with th