“As well for me--or for her?” and there was a serene significance in the query. Mount Dunstan thought a few seconds. “I confess,” he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow between the eyes well and with directness. “I confess that it would not have occurred to me to ask you to do anything or refrain from doing it for her sake.” “Thank you. Perhaps you are right. One learns that one must protect one's self. I shall not talk--neither will you. I know that. I was a fool to let it out. The storm is over. I must ride home.” He rose from his seat and stood smiling. “It would smash up things nicely if the new beauty's appearance in the great world were preceded by chatter of the unseemly affection of some adorer of ill repute. Unfairly enough it is always the woman who is hurt.” “Unless,” said Mount Dunstan civilly, “there should arise the poor, primeval brute, in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the man to blame, and break every bone and sinew in his damned body.” “The newspapers would enjoy that more than she would,” answered Sir Nigel. “She does not like the newspapers. They are too ready to disparage the multi-millionaire, and cackle about members of his family.” The unhidden hatred which still professed to hide itself in the depths of their pupils, as they regarded each other, had its birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of the earth, or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the blazing sun. It was well that at this moment they should part ways. Sir Nigel's horse being brought, he went on the way which was his. “It was a mistake to say what I did,” he said before going. “I ought to have held my tongue. But I am under the same roof with her. At any rate, that is a privilege no other man shares with me.” He rode off smartly, his horse's hoofs splashing in the rain pools left in the avenue after the storm. He was not so sure after all that he had made a mistake, and for the moment he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not. His agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate, proud brute he had left behind, sitting alone among his shut doors and closed corridors. They had not shaken hands either at meeting or parting. Queer thing it was--the kind of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset by a woman. It was amusing enough that it should be she who was upsetting him after all these years--impudent little Betty, with the ferocious manner. CHAPTER XXXVIII AT SHANDY'S On a late-summer evening in New York the atmosphere surrounding a certain corner table at Shandy's cheap restaurant in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of excitement.