"I guess he didn't! There's a queer woman, Will. The inscrutable ways of Providence were not in it with hers. She hated me, but she wouldn't let go of me; seemed to be her idea that shaking one man was enough and she wouldn't let me make her a widow a second time. By George, I couldn't shake her--I had to live off her!" William shrugged his shoulders and scowled. It was incredible that this could be his own brother who spoke thus of the gravest relationships of life. And it was with a steady sinking of spirit that it was beaten in upon him that this man had come back to plant himself at his door. He was busy calculating the effect upon himself, his family, and his business of the prodigal's return. He was shocked, disgusted, alarmed. His wife had told him in the long vigil that followed her return from Amzi Montgomery's house, when she learned that her brother-in-law was sleeping off his spree in her guest-room, that Jack had to go. She was proud and arrogant, and she had no idea of relinquishing her social pre-eminence--not too easily won--in the town to which William Holton had brought her to live out her life. One or two of the old families had never received her with any cordiality, clearly by reason of the old scandal. And where there are only seventeen thousand people in a town the indifference of two or three, when they happen to include a woman like Mrs. King, was not to be ignored or borne without rancor. William's indignation was intensified as he reviewed Jack's disclosures from the angle his wife had drawn for him in the midnight conference. His curiosity was sharpened, however, as to the subsequent relationship of Jack and Lois Kirkwood. Seattle is a long way from Montgomery and lines of communication few and slight. Samuel, returning from his visits to the coast, had usually been too full of his own schemes to furnish any satisfactory details of Jack and his wife. William dropped his plumb-line in a new spot where he fancied the water would prove shallow. "You lived off her, didn't you, until you had lived up all she had? The gospel didn't neglect her; she got her share of the punishment."