“That is a mere form of words, if you will pardon my saying so,” he said, and his voice was dangerously quiet and controlled. “There is difference between us in years, of course, but that goes for nothing. In experience, in knowledge of the world, if I may say so, the difference between us is practically nil. I am, as you say, your son’s friend. But is that a reason for refusing me a larger form of the right which you yourself have pressed upon me, to watch over him and to supplement your care where it must inevitably fall short? For Julian’s sake!” He was confronting her now, looking straight down at her, and as he spoke the last words, all the concern and agitation, partly affected, partly real, with which her face had been moved, vanished before a set expression of unalterable resolution. “For Julian’s sake,” she said, in a low, decisive voice, “it is impossible.” He stood for a moment watching her, all the evil of his face standing out in intense relief, and then he made a slight, cold gesture of acquiescence. “May I take you back into the large room?” he said. She held out her hand to him with an eager gesture of apology and appeal. “We are friends still?” she murmured. And the murmur was almost pathetically genuine in its anxiety. “It makes no difference?” Loring’s mouth was not good to look at as he answered in a tone absolutely destitute of expression: “Certainly not!” CHAPTER VI If evil thoughts and evil passions could have a tangible effect upon the physical atmosphere, the air of Marston Loring’s room, an hour later, should have been thick and heavy. He was sitting thrown back in an easy-chair, his evening coat replaced by a smoking jacket, a glass of whisky and seltzer-water close to his hand. There were also cigars on the table, but he was not smoking. He was staring straight before him into vacancy. His face was pale and set with vindictive passion, to the existence of which in his nature the general callousness of his expression gave no clue. It was many years since Marston Loring had felt as he felt to-night. It was many years since he had been foiled and thwarted--“made a fool of,” as he himself would have said; and all that was blackest and worst in the man was roused by the process. His life, ever since he had realised, at the age of twenty-five, that there were prizes in the world which some men obtained and other men failed to obtain, had been ruled by a series of carefully made and elaborately worked out calculations. Everything he had done, and everything he had not done, had been included in one or other of these calculations; carefully designed to meet certain ends, all of which met and culminated in the one great end of existence as he conceived it--material prosperity and position.