The fact that Cap'n Lucy should profit by it Taft had heretofore hardly heeded, since this was the necessary incident of his own greater profit. Now, however, that treachery, as he esteemed it, had riddled the whole finespun web and brought it to naught, a turmoil of rage possessed him. It seemed some curious chicanery of fate that he alone should sustain loss, and that to others should accrue all the advantage of his subtle weavings of chance and fact, as if the threads still held fast. Cap'n Lucy was in possession, doubtless, of many hundred acres of Kenniston's land. He suddenly grudged them to Cap'n Lucy as he had never bethought himself to grudge them to Kenniston. Jealousy is an intimate passion, and insistently of the soil. The neighbor, the associate, the friend's friend,--it makes no far casts. Kenniston was beyond its restricted bounds. Cap'n Lucy's causticity, his arrogance, his insulting courage which belittled the possibilities of another man's wrath, his intrenchment in the subservience of his household, and his preëminence in the esteem of his small world did not serve to commend him to his unwilling benefactor, who stood in immediate contemplation of his own loss. And as the radiant face of Julia appeared in the dim midst of Taft's recollection, he rose to his feet, his resolution taken in the instant. He had not forgotten the look in Larrabee's eyes when Espey had demanded of him whom he had been "a-courtin' at Tems's." Now, with Espey gone, and Larrabee foot-loose and free, it might chance that these hundreds of acres of which he had bereft Kenniston would one day fall into Larrabee's possession as his wife's inheritance, when Cap'n Lucy should go to his account,--which Taft doubted not would be a long one. "I'll be dad-burned," he cried, "ef I'll stand by an' see Kenniston choused fur old Lucy or Lar'bee, air one!"