"Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes." Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence. "Thank you, Martin," she said quietly. He turned to her with fury. "What did you mean at breakfast," he asked, "by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?" She looked at him with contempt but no very active hostility. "I was simply telling you something that I thought you ought to know," she said. "It is what everybody is saying--that you and she have been meeting every day for weeks, sitting in the Park after dark together, going to the theatre. People draw their own conclusions, I suppose." "How much have you told father of this?" he demanded. "I don't know at all what father has heard," she answered. "You've been that girl's enemy since the first moment that she came here," he continued, growing angrier and angrier at her quiet indifference. "Now you're trying to damage her character." "On the contrary," she answered, "I told you because I thought you ought to know what people were saying. The girl doesn't matter to me one way or another--but I'm sorry for her if she thinks she cares for you. That won't bring her much happiness." Then suddenly her impassivity had a strange effect upon him. He could not answer her. He left them both, and went up to his room. As soon as he had closed the door of his bedroom he knew that his bad time was come upon him. It was a physical as well as a spiritual dominion. The room visibly darkened before his eyes, his brain worked as it would in dreams suggesting its own thoughts and wishes and intentions. A dark shadow hung over him, hands were placed upon his eyes, only one thought came before him again and again and again. "You know, you have long known, that you are doomed to make miserable everything that you touch, to ruin every one with whom you come in contact. That is your fate, and you can no more escape from it than you can escape from your body!" How many hours of this kind he had known in Spain, in France, in South America. Often at the very moment when he had thought that he was at last settling down to some decent steady plan of life he would be jerked from his purpose, some delay or failure would frustrate him, and there would follow the voice in his ear and the hands on his eyes. It was indeed as though he had been pledged to something in his early life, and because he had broken from that pledge had been pursued ever since ...