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Right of Way, The

<h2> CHAPTER III. AFTER FIVE YEARS </h2> <h3> "You have forgotten me?" </h3> Charley Steele's glance was serenely non-committal as he answered drily: "I cannot remember doing so." The other man's eyelids drew down with a look of anger, then the humour of the impertinence worked upon him, and he gave a nervous little laugh and said: "I am John Brown." "Then I'm sure my memory is not at fault," remarked Charley, with an outstretched hand. "My dear Brown! Still preaching little sermons?" "Do I look it?" There was a curious glitter in John Brown's eyes. "I'm not preaching little sermons, and you know it well enough." He laughed, but it was a hard sort of mirth. "Perhaps you forgot to remember that, though," he sneeringly added. "It was the work of your hands." "That's why I should remember to forget it—I am the child of modesty." Charley touched the corners of his mouth with his tongue, as though his lips were dry, and his eyes wandered to a saloon a little farther down the street. "Modesty is your curse," rejoined Brown mockingly. "Once when you preached at me you said that beauty was my curse." Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and his eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John Brown's outward and showy frankness did not come from the real John Brown. John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on the ruddy cheeks of his old friend. "Do they call you Beauty now as they used to?" he asked, rather insolently. "No. They only say, 'There goes Charley Steele!'" The tongue again touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway down the street, over which was written in French: "Jean Jolicoeur, Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented liquors." Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity. "I'm thinking of Bunyan," said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele. "I'll paraphrase him and say: 'There, but for beauty and a monocle, walks John Brown.'" Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver, not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: "Who knows!" "That was what you always said—who knows! That did for John Brown." Charley seemed not to hear the remark. "What are you doing now?" he asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth of manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young. The lean parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure, had written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty. "Nothing much," John Brown replied. "What last?" "Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior." "Failed?" "More or less. There are hopes yet. I've kept the wolf from the door." "What are you going to do?" "Don't know—nothing, perhaps; I've not the courage I had." "I'd have thought you might find arsenic a good thing," said Charley, holding out a silver cigarette-case, his eyes turning slowly from the startled, gloomy face of the man before him, to the cool darkness beyond the open doorway of that saloon on the other side of the street. John Brown shivered—there was something so cold-blooded in the suggestion that he might have found arsenic a good thing. The metallic glare of Charley's eye-glass seemed to give an added cruelty to the words. Charley's monocle was the token of what was behind his blue eye-one ceaseless interrogation. It was that everlasting questioning, the ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown's mind, and driven him at last from the church and the possible gaiters of a dean into the rough business of life, where he had been a failure. Yet as Brown looked at Charley the old fascination came on him with a rush. His hand suddenly caught Charley's as he took a cigarette, and he said: "Perhaps I'll find arsenic a good thing yet." For reply Charley laid a hand on his arm-turned him towards the shade of the houses opposite. Without a word they crossed the street, entered the saloon, and passed to a little back room, Charley giving an unsympathetic stare to some men at the bar who seemed inclined to speak to him. As the two passed into the small back room with the frosted door, one of the strangers said to the other: "What does he come here for, if he's too proud to speak! What's a saloon for! I'd like to smash that eye-glass for him!" "He's going down-hill fast," said the other. "He drinks steady—steady." "Tiens—tiens!" interposed Jean Jolicoeur, the landlord. "It is not harm to him. He drink all day, an' he walk a crack like a bee-line." "He's got the handsomest wife in this city. If I was him, I'd think more of myself," answered the Englishman. "How you think more—hein? You not come down more to my saloon?" "No, I wouldn't come to your saloon, and I wouldn't go to Theophile Charlemagne's shebang at the Cote Dorion." "You not like Charlemagne's hotel?" said a huge black-bearded pilot, standing beside the landlord. "Oh, I like Charlemagne's hotel, and I like to talk to Suzon Charlemagne, but I'm not married, Rouge Gosselin—" "If he go to Charlemagne's hotel, and talk some more too mooch to dat Suzon Charlemagne, he will lose dat glass out of his eye," interrupted Rouge Gosselin. "Who say he been at dat place?" said Jean Jolicoeur. "He bin dere four times las' month, and dat Suzon Charlemagne talk'bout him ever since. When dat Narcisse Bovin and Jacques Gravel come down de river, he better keep away from dat Cote Dorion," sputtered Rouge Gosselin. "Dat's a long story short, all de same for you—bagosh!" Rouge Gosselin flung off his glass of white whiskey, and threw after it a glass of cold water. "Tiens! you know not M'sieu' Charley Steele," said Jean Jolicoeur, and turned on his heel, nodding his head sagely. <h2> CHAPTER IV. CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY </h2> A hot day a month later Charley Steele sat in his office staring before him into space, and negligently smoking a cigarette. Outside there was a slow clacking of wheels, and a newsboy was crying "La Patrie! La Patrie! All about the War in France! All about the massacree!" Bells—wedding-bells—were ringing also, and the jubilant sounds, like the call of the newsboy, were out of accord with the slumberous feeling of the afternoon. Charley Steele turned his head slowly towards the window. The branches of a maple-tree half crossed it, and the leaves moved softly in the shadow they made. His eye went past the tree and swam into the tremulous white heat of the square, and beyond to where in the church-tower the bells were ringing-to the church doors, from which gaily dressed folk were issuing to the carriages, or thronged the pavement, waiting for the bride and groom to come forth into a new-created world—for them. Charley looked through his monocle at the crowd reflectively, his head held a little to one side in a questioning sort of way, on his lips the ghost of a smile—not a reassuring smile. Presently he leaned forward slightly and the monocle dropped from his eye. He fumbled for it, raised it, blew on it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and screwed it carefully into his eye again, his rather bushy brow gathering over it strongly, his look sharpened to more active thought. He stared straight across the square at a figure in heliotrope, whose face was turned to a man in scarlet uniform taller than herself two glowing figures towards whom many other eyes than his own were directed, some curiously, some disdain fully, some sadly. But Charley did not see the faces of those who looked on; he only saw two people—one in heliotrope, one in scarlet. Presently his white firm hand went up and ran through his hair nervously, his comely figure settled down in the chair, his tongue touched the corners of his red lips, and his eyes withdrew from the woman in heliotrope and the man in scarlet, and loitered among the leaves of the tree at the window. The softness of the green, the cool health of the foliage, changed the look of his eye from something cold and curious to something companionable, and scarcely above a whisper two words came from his lips: "Kathleen! Kathleen!" By the mere sound of the voice it would have been hard to tell what the words meant, for it had an inquiring cadence and yet a kind of distant doubt, a vague anxiety. The face conveyed nothing—it was smooth, fresh, and immobile. The only point where the mind and meaning of the man worked according to the law of his life was at the eye, where the monocle was caught now as in a vise. Behind this glass there was a troubled depth which belied the self-indulgent mouth, the egotism speaking loudly in the red tie, the jewelled finger, the ostentatiously simple yet sumptuous clothes. At last he drew in a sharp, sibilant breath, clicked his tongue—a sound of devil-may-care and hopelessness at once—and turned to a little cupboard behind him. The chair squeaked on the floor as he turned, and he frowned, shivered a little, and kicked it irritably with his heel. From the cupboard he took a bottle of liqueur, and, pouring out a small glassful, drank it off eagerly. As he put the bottle away, he said again, in an abstracted fashion, "Kathleen!" Then, seating himself at the table, as if with an effort towards energy, he rang a bell. A clerk entered. "Ask Mr. Wantage to come for a moment," he said. "Mr. Wantage has gone to the church—to the wedding," was the reply. "Oh, very well. He will be in again this afternoon?" "Sure to, sir." "Just so. That will do." The clerk retired, and Charley, rising, unlocked a drawer, and taking out some books and papers, laid them on the table. Intently, carefully, he began to examine them, referring at the same time to a letter which had lain open at his hand while he had been sitting there. For a quarter of an hour he studied the books and papers, then, all at once, his fingers fastened on a point and stayed. Again he read the letter lying beside him. A flush crimsoned his face to his hair—a singular flush of shame, of embarrassment, of guilt—a guilt not his own. His breath caught in his throat. "Billy!" he gasped. "Billy, by God!" <h2> CHAPTER V. THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE </h2> The flush was still on Charley's face when the door opened slowly, and a lady dressed in heliotrope silk entered, and came forward. Without a word Charley rose, and, taking a step towards her, offered a chair; at the same time noticing her heightened colour, and a certain rigid carriage not in keeping with her lithe and graceful figure. There was no mistaking the quiver of her upper lip—a short lip which did not hide a wonderfully pretty set of teeth. With a wave of the hand she declined the seat. Glancing at the books and papers lying on the table, she flashed an inquiry at his flushed face, and, misreading the cause, with slow, quiet point, in which bitterness or contempt showed, she said meaningly: "What a slave you are!" "Behold the white man work!" he said good-naturedly, the flush passing slowly from his face. With apparent negligence he pushed the letter and the books and papers a little to one side, but really to place them beyond the range of her angry eyes. She shrugged her shoulders at his action. "For 'the fatherless children and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed?'" she said, not concealing her malice, for at the wedding she had just left all her married life had rushed before her in a swift panorama, and the man in scarlet had fixed the shooting pictures in her mind. Again a flush swept up Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight. His monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly: "You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen." There was a kind of appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he would be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some secret pity for her. Her look at his face was critical and cold. It was plain that she was not prepared for any extra friendliness on his part—there seemed no reason why he should add to his usual courtesy a note of sympathy to the sound of her name on his lips. He had not fastened the door of the cupboard from which he had taken the liqueur, and it had swung open a little, disclosing the bottle and the glass. She saw. Her face took on a look of quiet hardness. "Why did you not come to the wedding? She was your cousin. People asked where you were. You knew I was going." "Did you need me?" he asked quietly, and his eyes involuntarily swept to the place where he had seen the heliotrope and scarlet make a glow of colour on the other side of the square. "You were not alone." She misunderstood him. Her mind had been overwrought, and she caught insinuation in his voice. "You mean Tom Fairing!" Her eyes blazed. "You are quite right—I did not need you. Tom Fairing is a man that all the world trusts save you." "Kathleen!" The words were almost a cry. "For God's sake! I have never thought of 'trusting' men where you are concerned. I believe in no man"—his voice had a sharp bitterness, though his face was smooth and unemotional—"but I trust you, and believe in you. Yes, upon my soul and honour, Kathleen." As he spoke she turned quickly and stepped towards the window, an involuntary movement of agitation. He had touched a chord. But even as she reached the window and glanced down to the hot, dusty street, she heard a loud voice below, a reckless, ribald sort of voice, calling to some one to, "Come and have a drink." "Billy!" she said involuntarily, and looked down, then shrank back quickly. She turned swiftly on her husband. "Your soul and honour, Charley!" she said slowly. "Look at what you've made of Billy! Look at the company he keeps—John Brown, who hasn't even decency enough to keep away from the place he disgraced. Billy is always with him. You ruined John Brown, with your dissipation and your sneers at religion and your-'I-wonder-nows!' Of what use have you been, Charley? Of what use to anyone in the world? You think of nothing but eating, and drinking, and playing the fop." He glanced down involuntarily, and carefully flicked some cigarette-ash from his waistcoat. The action arrested her speech for a moment, and then, with a little shudder, she continued: "The best they can say of you is, 'There goes Charley Steele!'" "And the worst?" he asked. He was almost smiling now, for he admired her anger, her scorn. He knew it was deserved, and he had no idea of making any defence. He had said all in that instant's cry, "Kathleen!"—that one awakening feeling of his life so far. She had congealed the word on his lips by her scorn, and now he was his old debonair, dissipated self, with the impertinent monocle in his eye and a jest upon his tongue. "Do you want to know the worst they say?" she asked, growing pale to the lips. "Go and stand behind the door of Jolicoeur's saloon. Go to any street corner, and listen. Do you think I don't know what they say? Do you think the world doesn't talk about the company you keep? Haven't I seen you going into Jolicoeur's saloon when I was walking on the other side of the street? Do you think that all the world, and I among the rest, are blind? Oh, you fop, you fool, you have ruined my brother, you have ruined my life, and I hate and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!" He made a deprecating gesture and stared—a look of most curious inquiry. They had been married for five years, and during that time they had never been anything but persistently courteous to each other. He had never on any occasion seen her face change colour, or her manner show chagrin or emotion. Stately and cold and polite, she had fairly met his ceaseless foppery and preciseness of manner. But people had said of her, "Poor Kathleen Steele!" for her spotless name stood sharply off from his negligence and dissipation. They called her "Poor Kathleen Steele!" in sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal Fusileers. She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum, though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world were watching expectantly. No voice was raised against her. Her cold beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men's company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her, glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless. They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a pose as Charley's manner was to him. "I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!" So that was the way Kathleen felt! Charley's tongue touched his lips quickly, for they were arid, and he slowly said: "I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy. I have no remembrance of his imitating me in anything. Won't you sit down? It is very fatiguing, this heat." Charley was entirely himself again. His words concerning Billy Wantage might have been either an impeachment of Billy's character and, by deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two, which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now, leaded and weighted at the bottom. "I suppose you would say the same about John Brown! It is disconcerting at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he waved his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental sermons. I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before, that you only asked questions. Was that how you ruined the Rev. John Brown—and Billy?" Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an unusually dry tone as he replied: "I asked questions of John Brown; I answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!" There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose—as it seemed to her and all the world—there now rang through his words a note she had never heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain. She had been thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted second, been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce beneath the surface. "I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day," she said with a bitter laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such an infinite distance apart. "Why should one be serious then? There will be no question of an alibi, or evidence for the defence—no cross-examination. A cut-and-dried verdict!" She ignored his words. "Shall you be at home to dinner?" she rejoined coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot across the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met. "I fancy not," he answered, his eyes turned away also—towards the cupboard containing the liqueur. "Better ask Billy; and keep him in, and talk to him—I really would like you to talk to him. He admires you so much. I wish—in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with us," he added half abstractedly. He was trying to see his way through a sudden confusion of ideas. Confusion was rare to him, and his senses, feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding. "Don't be absurd," she said coldly. "You know I won't ask him, and you don't want him." "I have always said that decision is the greatest of all qualities—even when the decision is bad. It saves so much worry, and tends to health." Suddenly he turned to the desk and opened a tin box. "Here is further practice for your admirable gift." He opened a paper. "I want you to sign off for this building—leaving it to my absolute disposal." He spread the paper out before her. She turned pale and her lips tightened. She looked at him squarely in the eyes. "My wedding-gift!" she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders. A moment she hesitated, and in that moment seemed to congeal. "You need it?" she asked distantly. He inclined his head, his eye never leaving hers. With a swift angry motion she caught the glove from her left hand, and, doubling it back, dragged it off. A smooth round ring came off with it and rolled upon the floor. Stooping, he picked up the ring, and handed it back to her, saying: "Permit me." It was her wedding-ring. She took it with a curious contracted look and put it on the finger again, then pulled off the other glove quietly. "Of course one uses the pen with the right hand," she said calmly. "Involuntary act of memory," he rejoined slowly, as she took the pen in her hand. "You had spoken of a wedding, this was a wedding-gift, and—that's right, sign there!" There was a brief pause, in which she appeared to hesitate, and then she wrote her name in a large firm hand, and, throwing down the pen, caught up her gloves, and began to pull them on viciously. "Thanks. It is very kind of you," he said. He put the document in the tin box, and took out another, as without a word, but with a grave face in which scorn and trouble were mingled, she now turned towards the door. "Can you spare a minute longer?" he said, and advanced towards her, holding the new document in his hand. "Fair exchange is no robbery. Please take this. No, not with the right hand; the left is better luck—the better the hand, the better the deed," he added with a whimsical squint and a low laugh, and he placed the paper in her left hand. "Item No. 2 to take the place of item No. 1." She scrutinised the paper. Wonder filled her face. "Why, this is a deed of the homestead property—worth three times as much!" she said. "Why—why do you do this?" "Remember that questions ruin people sometimes," he answered, and stepped to the door and turned the handle, as though to show her out. She was agitated and embarrassed now. She felt she had been unjust, and yet she felt that she could not say what ought to be said, if all the rules were right. "Thank you," she said simply. "Did you think of this when—when you handed me back the ring?" "I never had an inspiration in my life. I was born with a plan of campaign." "I suppose I ought to—kiss you!" she said in some little confusion. "It might be too expensive," he answered, with a curious laugh. Then he added lightly: "This was a fair exchange"—he touched the papers—"but I should like you to bear witness, madam, that I am no robber!" He opened the door. Again there was that curious penetrating note in his voice, and that veiled look. She half hesitated, but in the pause there was a loud voice below and a quick foot on the stairs. "It's Billy!" she said sharply, and passed out. <h2> CHAPTER VI. THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB </h2> A half-hour later Charley Steele sat in his office alone with Billy Wantage, his brother-in-law, a tall, shapely fellow of twenty-four. Billy had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his whole manner was indolently careless and irresponsible. In spite of this, however, his grey eyes were nervously fixed on Charley, and his voice was shaky as he said, in reply to a question as to his finances: "That's my own business, Charley." Charley took a long swallow from the tumbler of whiskey and soda beside him, and, as he drew some papers towards him, answered quietly: "I must make it mine, Billy, without a doubt." The tall youth shifted in his chair and essayed to laugh. "You've never been particular about your own business. Pshaw, what's the use of preaching to me!" Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of surprise, a hint of embarrassment. This youth, then, thought him something of a fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer idiosyncrasy! This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that table, despised him for his follies, and believed in him less than his wife—two people who had lived closer to him than any others in the world. Before he answered he lifted the glass beside him and drank to the last drop, then slowly set it down and said, with a dangerous smile: "I have always been particular about other people's finances, and the statement that you haven't isn't preaching, it's an indictment—so it is, Billy." "An indictment!" Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook. "That's what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching. You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!" For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside in the square came the Marche-t'en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of some loafer at the corner. Charley's look imprisoned his brother-in-law, and Billy's eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley's finger, which held like a nail the record of his infamy. Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado, but with fear in look and motion: "Don't stare like that. The thing's done, and you can't undo it, and that's all there is about it." Charley had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!" He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his mind into a painful red obscurity. "Oh yes, it can be undone, and it's not all there is about it!" he answered quietly. He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table. Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes. What did Charley mean to do? To give him in charge? To send him to jail? To shut him out from the world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years? Never to go forth free among his fellows! Never to play the gallant with all the pretty girls he knew! Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco, or good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or moose-hunting, or any sort of philandering! The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve. "What did you do with the money?" said Charley, after a minute's silence, in which two minds had travelled far. "I put it into mines." "What mines?" "Out on Lake Superior." "What sort of mines?" "Arsenic." Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his white waistcoat. "In arsenic-mines!" He put the monocle to his eye again. "On whose advice?" "John Brown's." "John Brown's!" Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and scattered by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come home to roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air. He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together. Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and the sequence of his intellect. "It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his mouth. "No. What would have been the good?" "Of course. Speculation—you bought heavily to sell on an expected rise?" "Yes." There was something so even in Charley's manner and tone that Billy misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the best of a bad job. "You see," Billy said eagerly, "it seemed dead certain. He showed me the way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice little scoop, at no one's cost. I thought it was a dead-sure thing—and I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn't lend me any more. If Kathleen had only done the decent thing—" A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley's face—never before in his life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child. Something had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele. "Don't be a sweep—leave Kathleen out of it!" he said, in a sharp, querulous voice—a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use, as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly through a melee of the emotions. It was not the voice of Charley Steele the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world. "What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?" he said, after a pause. There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even and inquiring. "Nearly all." "Don't lie. You've been living freely. Tell the truth, or—or I'll know the reason why, Billy." "About two-thirds-that's the truth. I had debts, and I paid them." "And you bet on the races?" "Yes." "And lost?" "Yes. See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck—" "Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are oppressed!" Charley's look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he recalled his wife's words and his own reply. A quick contempt and a sort of meditative sarcasm were in the tone. It was curious, too, that he could smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now. "It's all gone, I suppose?" he added. "All but about a hundred dollars." "Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it." Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic. He felt danger ahead. "I'll go and shoot myself!" he said, banging the table with his fist so that the whiskey-tumbler shook. He was hardly prepared for what followed. Charley's nerves had been irritated; his teeth were on edge. This threat, made in such a cheap, insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear. He knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not do, shooting himself was that one thing. His own life was very sweet to Billy Wantage. Charley hated him the more at that moment because he was Kathleen's brother. For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen, it was that she could not do a mean thing. Cold, unsympathetic she might be, cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable—never! This weak, cowardly youth was her brother! No one had ever seen such a look on Charley Steele's face as came upon it now—malicious, vindictive. He stooped over Billy in a fury. "You think I'm a fool and an ass—you ignorant, brainless, lying cub! You make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and stealing the money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me so low that you think you'll bamboozle me by threats of suicide. You haven't the courage to shoot yourself—drunk or sober. And what do you think would be gained by it? Eh, what do you think would be gained? You can't see that you'd insult your sister as well as—as rob me." Billy Wantage cowered. This was not the Charley Steele he had known, not like the man he had seen since a child. There was something almost uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent; but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose. Billy quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, "as rob me!" Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and orphans! That gave him a ray of hope. In a paroxysm of fear, joined to emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy—for the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen's sake, for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured. Tears came readily to his eyes, real tears—of excitement; but he could measure, too, the strength of his appeal. "If you'll stand by me in this, I'll pay you back every cent, Charley," he cried. "I will, upon my soul and honour! You shan't lose a penny, if you'll only see me through. I'll work my fingers off to pay it back till the last hour of my life. I'll be straight till the day I die—so help me God!" Charley's eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were. If he could only decently take a drink! But how could he with this boy kneeling before him? His breath scorched his throat. "Get up!" he said shortly. "I'll see what I can do—to-morrow. Go away home. Don't go out again to-night. And come here at ten o'clock in the morning." Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust from his knees, and, seizing Charley's hand, said: "You're the best fellow in the world, Charley." He went towards the door, dusting his face of emotion as he had dusted his knees. The old selfish, shrewd look was again in his eyes. Charley's gaze followed him gloomily. Billy turned the handle of the door. It was locked. Charley came forward and unlocked it. As Billy passed through, Charley, looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: "By Heaven, I believe you're not worth it!" Then he shut the door again and locked it. He almost ran back and opened the cupboard. Taking out the bottle of liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off. Three times he did this, then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in his face. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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