“I repeat that I _might_ say this--but I will not. I prefer to view it in another light. I don’t think you are a knave. To be that requires intelligence. You are a fool,--a conceited, presumptuous, offensive fool. You set yourself up to judge _me_; you arrogate to yourself airs of moral superiority, and assume to regulate affairs of State by the light of your virtue and wisdom--and you have not brains enough meanwhile to take care of yourself against the cheapest wiles of a silly woman, who amuses herself with young simpletons just to kill time. You take upon yourself to lay down the law to a great National party--and you don’t know enough to see through even so transparent a game as this. Get out of my sight! I have wasted too much time with you. It annoys me to think that such an idiot belongs to the family.” Albert had rightly calculated that he could thus most deeply and surely wound Seth, but he was mistaken in his estimate of the nature of the response. If Seth’s vanity was scalded by his brother’s words, he at least didn’t show it. But he did advance upon Albert with clenched fists, and gleaming eyes, and shout fiercely at him: “A man who will speak that way of his wife is a coward and a scoundrel! And if it is my cousin Isabel he means, he is a liar to boot! If you were not my brother----” “If I were not, what then?” Albert waited a moment for the answer, which the conflict between Seth’s rage and his half-guilty consciousness choked in the utterance, and then calmly turned on his heel and left the room, by the same outside door at which he had entered. As Seth went upstairs, he heard Isabel’s door close softly. “I wonder how much of it she heard?” he said to himself. CHAPTER XXI.--THE NIGHT: MASTER AND MAN. ALBERT walked across the yard toward the larger of the new stable buildings. It was a dry, warm, luminous night, radiant overhead with the glory of a whole studded heaven of stars. The moon, the full, shining-faced moon of October, would rise in an hour or so, and then would come pale mists along the valley bottom-lands, and perhaps clouds in the eastern sky. But one could walk bareheaded in this soft starlight now, without a fear of cold. The lawyer paid no sort of attention to the night, but strode across the grass, swung himself over the stile, and pulled back the great stable door, creaking shrilly on its rollers, with angry energy. He stopped upon the threshold of the darkness, through which the shapes of carriages covered with white sheets vaguely loomed, and called out: “Milton!” There was the answering sound of footsteps overhead. A door at the top of the stairs was opened, and a flood of light illumined the staircase. “Oh, you’ve got back, ay?” said a voice from the top.