Mrs. Toomey hesitated, then timidly: "I can't get it out of my head, Jap, but that he's related to Kate, and if that should happen to be so--" "Good Lord! So you've dug that up to worry about? Look here--if he'd had any interest in her he'd have knocked me cold the first day he arrived." "What do you mean?" Mrs. Toomey asked quickly. "Just that. Her name happened to come up, and I didn't mince my words in telling him about her past." "Oh, Jap! Whatever made you do that?" His thin lips curled. "Why shouldn't I? Damn her--I hate her, somehow. The upstart--the gutter-snipe!" She laid her hand across his mouth. "You--shock me, Jap! I don't understand why you are so--venomous toward Kate. Sometimes," she looked at him searchingly, "I've wondered if you've injured her." "What do you mean?" He breathed hard, in sudden excitement. She stood for a moment twisting a button on his coat--her eyes downcast. Finally: "Nothing--much." In the office of the Prouty House, redolent of the juniper and spruce boughs which took the bareness from the walls, the guests hungrily watched the hands of the clock creep towards the fashionable hour of eight. "Among those present" was Mr. Clarence Teeters, circulating freely in a full dress coat and gray trousers--the latter worn over a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots and the former over a negligee shirt, beneath the cuffs of which two leather straps for strengthening the wrists peeped out. Fresh from the hands of the barber, Mr. Teeters' hair, sleek, glossy, fragrant, and brushed straight back, gave him a marked resemblance to a muskrat that has just come up from a dive. With a sublimated confidence that was sickening to such citizens as had known him when he worked for wages and wore overalls, and particularly to Toomey, who took Teeters' success upon the ranch where he himself had failed as a personal affront, Mr. Teeters flitted among the ladies, as impartial as a bee in a bed of hollyhocks, tossing off compliments with an ease which was a revelation to those who remembered the time when his brain stopped working in the presence of the opposite sex quite as effectually as though he had been hit with an axe. Toomey not only resented Teeters' presence but the informality of his manner toward Prentiss, which Toomey regarded as his special prerogative. He already had had an argument with Sudds as to the advisability of including Teeters among the guests, and now during a lull his judgment was fully verified. Mr. Teeters with a proud glance at the gaily draped room and at the table decorated with real carnations and festoons of smilax, which were visible through the double doors opening into the dining room, inquired of Prentiss with hearty friendliness: "Say, feller, don't this swell lay-out kinda take you back to Chicago or New York?"