mumbling vague sounds that might have been dismissal or farewell, when he suddenly raised his voice in a loud, combative note: 

 "Oh, don't bother to be polite. There's no love between us and there needn't be any hypocrisies. You want to get rid of me and I want to go. But before I do, I'd like to say something." He drew a step nearer, his face suddenly suffused with a dark flush, his eyes set and narrowed. "You've done one thing to me that you're going to regret—stolen my child. Yes," in answer to a protesting sound from Mr. Janney, "stolen her—that's what I said. You think you can hide behind your money bags and do what you like. Maybe you can nine times, but there's a tenth when things don't work the way you've expected. Watch out for it—it's due now." 

His voice was raised, loud, furious, threatening. The dining room door flew open and Dixon appeared on the threshold in alarmed consternation. Mr. Janney stepped forward belligerently: 

 "Chapman, now look here—" 

 Mrs. Janney laid a hand on her husband's arm: 

 "Don't answer him, Sam," then to Chapman, her face stony in its controlled passion, "I want no more words with you. Our affairs are finished. Kindly leave the house as soon as possible." She turned to the butler who was staring at them with dropped jaw: "Shut that door, Dixon, and stay where you belong." The sound of footsteps at the stair-head caught her ear. "The other servants are coming: we'll have an audience for this pleasant scene. We'd better go, Sam, as Chapman doesn't seem to have heard my request for him to leave, the only thing for us is to leave ourselves." 

 She swept her husband off across the hall toward the balcony. Behind them the young man's voice rose: 

 "Oh don't have any fears. I'm going. But I may come back—that's what you want to remember—I may come back to settle the score." 

 Then they heard his footsteps mounting the stairs in a long, leaping run. 

 In his own room he found his valet, Willitts, a small, fair-haired young Englishman, closing the trunks. The door was open and he had a suspicion that the footsteps Mrs. Janney had heard were probably Willitts'. He didn't care, he didn't care what Willitts had heard. The man knew anyhow; they all knew. There wasn't a servant in the house or a soul in the village who wouldn't by to-morrow be telling how the Janneys had thrown him out and were 

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