calm mask of his long white face his mind worked wickedly and deliberately. The temerity of Westmacott, whose nature was notoriously timid, had surprised him for a moment. But anon, reading the boy's mind as readily as though it had been a scroll unfolded for his instruction, he saw that Westmacott, on the strength of his position as his sister's brother, conceived himself immune. Mr. Wilding's avowed courtship of the lady, the hopes he still entertained of winning her, despite the aversion she was at pains to show him, gave Westmacott assurance that Mr. Wilding would never elect to shatter his all too slender chances by embroiling himself in a quarrel with her brother. And—reading him, thus, aright—Mr. Wilding put on that mask of patience, luring the boy into greater conviction of the security of his position. And Richard, conceiving himself safe in his entrenchment behind the bulwarks of his brothership to Ruth Westmacott, and heartened further by the excess of wine he had consumed, persisted in insults he would never otherwise have dared to offer.     

       “Who seeks to retrieve?” he crowed offensively, boldly looking up into the other's face. “It seems you are yourself reluctant.” And he laughed a trifle stridently, and looked about him for applause, but found none.     

       “You are overrash,” Lord Gervase disapproved him harshly.     

       “Not the first coward I've seen grow valiant at a table,” put in Trenchard by way of explanation, and might have come to words with Blake on that same score, but that in that moment Wilding spoke again.     

       “Reluctant to do what?” he questioned amiably, looking Westmacott so straightly between the eyes that the boy shifted uneasily on his high-backed chair.     

       Nevertheless, still full of confidence in the unassailability of his position, the mad youth answered, “To cleanse yourself of what I threw at you.”      

       “Fan me, ye winds!” gasped Nick Trenchard, and looked with expectancy at his friend Wilding.     

       Now there was one factor with which, in basing with such craven shrewdness his calculations upon Mr. Wilding's feelings for his sister, young Richard had not reckoned. He was not to know that Wilding, bruised and wounded by Miss Westmacott's scorn of him, had reached that borderland where love 

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