The old man moved from behind the table corner and approached Danny, walking slowly, with his hands behind him. He came to a stop before the boy, slowly unbuttoned his coat, reached to an inner pocket, and drew out a checkbook. "How much?" Danny's gesture, carried out, surely would have resulted in a blow strong enough to send the book spinning across the room; but he stopped it halfway. His eyes were puffed and bloodshot; his pulse hammered loudly under his ears, and the rush of blood made his head roar. Before him floated a mist, fogging thought as it did his vision. The boy's voice was scarcely recognizable as he spoke. It was hard and cold--somewhat like the one which had so scourged him. "Keep your money," he said, looking squarely at his father at the cost of a peculiar, unreal effort. "I'll get out--and without your help. Some day I'll--I'll show you what a puny thing this faith of yours is!" The elder Lenox, buttoning his coat with brisk motions, merely said, "Very well." He left the room. Danny heard his footsteps cross the hall, heard the big front door sigh when it closed as though it rejoiced at the completion of a distasteful task. Then he shut his eyes and struck his thighs twice with stiff forearms. He was boiling, blood and brain! At first he thought it anger; perhaps anger had been there, but it was not the chief factor of that tumult. It was humiliation. The horrid, unanswerable truth had seared Danny's very body--witness the anguished wrinkles on his brow--and his molten consciousness could find no argument to justify himself, even to act as a balm! "He never _said_ it before," the boy moaned, and in that spoken thought was the nearest thing to comfort that he could conjure. He stood in the library a long time, gradually cooling, gradually nursing the bitterness that grew up in the midst of conflicting impulses. The look in his eyes changed from bewilderment to a glassy cynicism, and he began to walk back and forth unsteadily. He paced the long length of the room a dozen times. Then, with a quickened stride, he passed into the hall, crossed it, and entered the dining room, the tip of his tongue caressing his lips. On the buffet stood a decanter, a heavy affair of finely executed glassworker's art. The dark stuff in it extended halfway up the neck, and as he reached for it Danny's lips parted. He lifted the receptacle and clutched at a whisky glass that stood on the same tray. He picked it up, looked calculatingly at it, set it down, and picked up a _tumbler_. The glass stopper of the bottle thudded on the mahogany; his nervous hand held the tumbler under its gurgling mouth. Half full, two-thirds, three-quarters, to within a finger's breadth of the top he filled it.