"Ay, some foolish quarrel between two young men. Perhaps you were both heated in argument; perhaps you had both been too free with liquor. But, however you put it, or however high the anger of you both may have gone, only a coward and scoundrel would take a man unawares and attempt to stab him. Young men may have their quarrels; but in these countries, sir, young men do not in their quarrels use the knife!" The old man was still standing a few feet distant from the chair in which Lavirotte sat. His left hand was clenched behind his back. His right hung down by his side, holding the revolver. "There was no quarrel of any kind. We had not even been together that night. I waited for him. I lay in hiding for him, and as he was passing by I sprang at him and tried to kill him without a word of warning." "Infamous monster," cried the old man, shaking with rage. "Do you mean to tell his father this?" James O'Donnell's hand tightened on the revolver, and without raising his wrist he threw the muzzle slightly upward. "Keep your hand still, sir. Keep your hand still. You came here to shoot me because I had failed to keep a promise which I had every reason to hope I could keep. You came here to shoot me, because, through no fault of mine, but through your own stupid wrong-headedness, you, in the decline of life, found yourself commercially a ruined man. You have had a long and prosperous career. I have had nothing but struggles and difficulties and disappointments all my life, short as it is. Suppose for a moment that Eugene, without knowing it, ruined all my life, all my future." "I can suppose nothing so absolutely absurd." "Then, sir, your want of imagination in this thing only confirms my former opinion of you--you are a fool. Keep your hand quiet. It might be a satisfaction for you to murder me when you came in first, and when your faith in my wickedness was without a flaw. But it will not do now, and you would have no more comfort in shooting me at this moment than you would in facing all the widows and orphans made by that bank, that rotten concern which you in your infatuation believed to be sound, which paid you heavy dividends for your money and your consent to be stupid, and which in the end reduced thousands of simple, thrifty folk to penury. Sir, will you put that pistol down on the table and take a chair?" This was even a still more unexpected attack than the former one. Mr. O'Donnell's mind was thrown into some confusion by finding that he was not only opposed in the field where he had made sure of success, but that his flanks were turned while he had been announcing victory to himself. Never in the whole course of his life had anyone before seriously questioned even his judgment, not to say the foundations of his honesty. And here was the very man for whom he entertained the greatest contempt and loathing, calmly assuming a superior tone and impugning the honesty of one who had hitherto been regarded as impeccable.