Gwinnan made no reply. His face was turned toward Harshaw with a certain unresponsiveness, an inscrutable questioning, a cadaverous gravity. His hollow eyes were very bright and large. Somehow they put Harshaw out of countenance. Something there was in their expression beyond his skill to decipher. He became a trifle embarrassed, and yet he could not have said why. He went on at random. He had observed that a number of people were remarking them. There was nothing uncommon in the peripatetic method that the interview had taken, but suddenly he found it odd that Gwinnan had not paused. “That fellow, Mink Lorey, is a most extraordinary and unexpected kind of scamp,” Harshaw proceeded uneasily, making talk. “To my certain knowledge, he cared so little about the girl that he refused to see her when she came to visit him in jail. But the idea that another man admired her seemed to set him wild.” Gwinnan stopped short. “What girl?” he asked, in his soft, inexpressive drawl. “The girl that testified,—Alethea Sayles,” said Harshaw, relieved that Gwinnan had spoken, and striving for his old bluff assurance, but still conscious that he had lost his tact. “She was pretty, very pretty indeed, and you were not alone in having the good taste to notice it. The rest of us didn’t have to pay for it with a broken head, though, eh, judge? Ha! ha!” There was a moment’s pause. “Mr. Harshaw,” said Gwinnan, leaning against one of the great pillars, the reflection in the plate-glass duplicating the posture on the snowy sidewalk, as if that other self, liberated and in isolated independence, busied in different scenes, now meditated, and now spoke and now lifted a fiery glance, “I will take this opportunity to tell you that I believe you to be an egregious liar, and I know you for an arrant hypocrite.” “Sir!” cried Harshaw, starting back, tingling from the words as if they were blows. He made an instinctive gesture toward his pistol pocket; it was empty. He was acutely conscious of the spectators who pressed a little nearer, noticing the excitement. Gwinnan’s voice had a singular carrying quality, and every deliberate, low-toned word was distinct. “I repudiate your professions of friendship. I despise your protestations of sympathy. If your threats at the court-house door in Shaftesville had been earlier repeated to me, ludicrously impotent as they are, you should never have approached me again. Now,”—his voice broke suddenly, in his feebleness and excitement, and was thin and tremulous and shrill,—“keep out of my way, or I will beat you with this stick like a dog!” Gwinnan had lifted the stick, and shook it threateningly in his trembling hand. Harshaw, with his own reasons for declining to give the first blow, could only shrink and wince in anticipation. The stick did not descend on him, however, for Gwinnan turned, and, leaning on it, made his way down the corridor among the wondering men, who slowly opened an aisle for him in their midst. XX.