"All I ask of you now," Gordon continued, quietly, "as my best friend, is to let my wife alone. Is that a reasonable request?" "No," was the emphatic answer. "Did I seek your wife? Yet nothing could have wrung from me the secret of my love had you not flung the challenge in my face again and again; and even then my love for you sealed my lips until she broke the spell to-day with words that cannot be unsaid." Gordon's face and voice softened. "Granted, Mark, I've been a fool. I know better now. I appeal to your sense of honour and our long friendship. Let this scene end it. Let us return to the old life and its standards." The big neck straightened. "Then go back," he flashed, in tones that cut like steel, "to the wife of your youth and the mother of your children!" Gordon's fist clenched; he was still a moment, and when he spoke his voice was like velvet. "It's useless to bandy epithets, or to argue, Mark. I don't reason about this thing. I only feel. My passion is very simple, very elemental. It flouts logic and reason. This woman is mine. I have paid the price, and I will kill the man who dares to take her. Do you understand?" The banker gave a sneering laugh, and twisted the muscles of his mouth. "Yes, I understand, and I'm not fainting with alarm. You will be a preacher and a poser to the end." "I have appealed to your principles and your sense of honour first," Gordon repeated, in a subdued voice. The one eye was closed with a smile. "Principles! Sense of honour! What principles? What sense of honour? I agree that, under the old view of marriage as a divine sacrament and a great social ordinance, sacrifice of one's desires for the sake of humanity might be noble. But in this paradise into which you have thrust me, with an invitation on your own door for all the world to enter and contest your position, and with you yourself shouting from the housetop freedom and fellowship---Sense of honour? Rubbish!" "I can see," snapped Gordon, "that one such beast as you is enough to transform heaven into hell." Overman slowly pulled his moustache, and a grin pushed his nose upward. "Exactly. I am the one odd individual your scheme overlooked--a normal human being with the simplest rational instincts, a clear brain and the muscle big enough to enforce a desire." "The muscle test is yet to come," Gordon coldly interrupted. The banker shrugged his shoulders. "I suppose so. And you know, Frank, the fear of man is an emotion I have never experienced." Gordon bent quickly toward him, his face quiet and pale, and said in muffled accents: "Well, you who have never feared man, listen. Get out of this house to-night, give up my wife, never speak to her again or cross my path, or else--" a pause--"I am going to disarm you, bend your bulldog's body across my knee by an art of which I am master, close your jaw with this fist on your throat, and break your back inch by inch. Will you go?" Overman surveyed the questioner with scorn.