“Stop,” she commanded. I drew back and bowed, and we stood confronting each other in silence. “And they call you a brave man,” she said at last, speaking slowly and steadily, as though she were picking each word. “It is like a brave man to insult a woman, because she wants to save her brother’s life.” When I raised my face it was burning, as though she had thrown vitriol. “If I have insulted you, Miss Fiske,” I said, “if I have ever insulted any woman, I hope to God that to-morrow morning your brother will kill me.” When I turned and looked back at her from the door, she was leaning against one of the pillars with her face bent in her hands, and weeping bitterly. I rode to the barracks and spent several hours in writing a long letter to Beatrice. I felt a great need to draw near to her. I was confused and sore and unhappy, and although nothing of this, nor of the duel appeared in my letter, I was comforted to think that I was writing it to her. It was good to remember that there was such a woman in the world, and when I compared her with the girl from whom I had just parted, I laughed out loud. And yet I knew that had I put the case to Beatrice, she would have discovered something to present in favor of Miss Fiske. “She was pleading for her brother, and she did not understand,” Beatrice would have said. But in my own heart I could find no excuse. Her family had brought me nothing but evil. Because her father would not pay his debts, I had been twice wounded and many times had risked death; the son had struck me with a whip in the public streets, and the sister had called me everything that is contemptible, from a cad to a hired cut-throat. So, I was done with the house of Fiske. My hand was against it. I owed it nothing.