“Yah!” snarled Bryton. “You—play fair! A lot you do! Where’s your gratitude? Tell me that! You owe everything you’ve got—the very clothes on your back—to my father. Didn’t he take you in when you were starving, and treat you like a daughter? Didn’t he give you his name, which wasn’t good enough for you when you took to the stage? Didn’t he leave you a pile of money, which kept you till you got a job with Rosenbaum? That was my money! It should have come to me! You practically robbed me of it. And now you stick by Demarest, who doesn’t care a hang about you, and let me go——” “Stop!” The girl’s face was pale, but her eyes flashed angrily. “You’ve said quite enough, Ralph Bryton,” she went on, in a cold, cutting voice, “to show me what sort of a man you really are, even if I hadn’t a pretty good notion of it before. A good deal of what you have said is true, but no one but a contemptible hound would have said it in the way you did. Your father did adopt me, and as long as he lived I loved him. He was more of a man than you’ll ever be. The money he left me wasn’t much, but it enabled me to live until I found something to do. The reason I didn’t take your father’s name was because it was yours, too.” Bryton winced at the contempt in her voice. She caught her breath, and went on swiftly: “Now, not content with pestering me to marry you, when you know I loathe the very sight of you, you want me to do a dishonorable thing which would make me hate myself all my life long. But I won’t do it! You knew that long ago, didn’t you? I’d play my part to-morrow night if I was dying, and I mean to play it for all that is in me. If ‘Jarvis of Yale’ isn’t a success, it won’t be because Marion Gray hasn’t done her best to make it so.” With the last word, she sprang swiftly to her feet, and, before the angry man realized what had happened, she reached the door and disappeared. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXII OUT OF A CLEAR SKY. Dick Merriwell was rather surprised to get a note from Demarest—the latter had not been able to reach him on the telephone—saying that he had been unexpectedly called to New York for the day, and asking Dick if he would not keep an eye on the workmen at the theatre that afternoon, if possible. This Merriwell was, of course, very ready to do. He made three trips down there before going to the field, and found matters progressing as well as could be expected.