“Goin’ to throw it away?” “Why?” “’Tain’t correct.” “How is it wrong?” “Don’t give _woman_ as a synonym for _lunatic_,” he said, and disappeared abruptly. CHAPTER XII Deputy Jenney, with a crumpled copy of the _Free Press_ in his hand, rushed into Abner Fownes’s office--for once omitting the formality of rapping on the door. He threw the paper upon the desk and stood huge, bristling, speechless. “What’s this?... What’s this?” Abner demanded, sharply. “Read it. Read it and see.... Hell’s busted loose in the henhouse.” Abner smoothed out the paper and read. His face did not change, but his little eyes glowed dully, with a light not pleasant to see, one that suggested pent-up heat, a compression of scorching, searing forces capable of awful explosion. He read the story of the finding of the whisky _cache_ from beginning to end; then reread it, missing no word, no suggestion. Jenney directed him to the editorial page with its conjectures and comment. For some moments he did not speak, but stared at his desk top with those dull-glowing eyes until one might have expected to see wisps of smoke arising from the spot they touched. Strangely enough, the thoughts of Abner Fownes were not upon the words he had read in the newspaper, but on the writer of them. He was thinking of her apart from this journalistic bomb which she had set off under the feet of Gibeon. Presently he would give that his consideration, but now Carmel Lee stood in the midst of his thoughts, and he reached out to engulf her in his hatred. He hated her with a burning, aching, hungry intensity--with the hatred of a vain man who has been humiliated and stripped stark of his vanity. The very words she had used, but, more than those, the expression of her eyes, was with him now. He watched her and listened to her again, and felt himself shrinking and deflating before her anger.... She despised him--him, Abner Fownes! Despised him! And he hated her for despising him. He hated her for stripping away so ruthlessly the mantle of pretense he had erected between himself and his own eyes. She had humiliated him before his own soul, and his soul was sick with the shame of it. For years he had lived with his pretense until it had become a part of himself, like the grafted branch upon the sterile tree. None in Gibeon had gainsaid his own estimate of himself. In his small realm he had been supreme--until he had come himself to believe his own pretense.... He hid Abner Fownes from himself studiously; allowed him to admire himself, to look upon himself as good and great.... In those wakeful moments of his soul when it opened its eyes and saw him as he was, he suffered acutely--and applied the ever-ready anesthetic.