"What on earth is the boy arguing with himself about?" thought Doctor Vardaman; these not very original remarks had, for all their emphasis, the air of being offered in advocacy of some doubtful cause; there was a trace of temper and self-consciousness in them, and even the speaker himself appeared unconvinced. "He's been having trouble with Steven, I suspect," the doctor concluded, remembering how capable Steven was of making trouble, and how difficult it was to manage him without recourse to a tyranny from which Gwynne would recoil. "That may be a good frame of mind for a lawyer, Gwynne," he said pleasantly. "That disposition, I mean, to allow a certain amount of right on every side. The question of expediency----" "That's what _I_ think," Gwynne interrupted eagerly. "It's as much a point of what's _best_ to do as of what's rigorously _right_ to do. But you can't make people see that; now people like----" "Mr. Steven Gwynne!" said Huddesley, opening the door. And even in the uproar of Steven's entrance--he could do nothing quietly, and had a voice of thunderous volume--Doctor Vardaman had time to observe Gwynne's start and changing colour. Huddesley withdrew, taking Steven's "artics" with a manner conveying his fixed belief that they should be handled with tongs; but the doctor, who generally viewed this comic by-play with profound amusement, for once let it pass unnoticed. As his guests fronted each other, the old gentleman felt a sudden menace in the air; something had gone wrong, had gone very wrong, indeed; that much was easy to read in the two lowering faces. He looked from one to the other in apprehension; he tried to relieve the situation by a gust of what he inwardly characterised as "futile patter," offering chairs and comments on the weather. That his unoffending parlour should be made the scene of a Gwynne family squabble did not strike him as outrageous; he felt too genuine and humane an interest in both parties. At the back of his mind the thought was busy that Steven must have been stirring up some kind of mischief with his confounded vapouring communistic and anarchistic theories, his "circulating medium," or Heaven knew what other foolishness; and how was Gwynne, or for that matter anybody else, to deal with him? The poor old fellow was not--not responsible; yet he could not be bullied like a slave, or put aside like a child; that would only make him worse! "It would be better, it would absolutely be better, if Steven would go stark mad and be done with it (Lord forgive me for saying so!)" he thought. "Then, at least, he could be cared for properly. As it is, you can't excite him, you can't reason with him, you can't control him!" An acute sympathy for both of them possessed him--for Steven as for a baby from whom one should tear away some dangerous beloved plaything--for Gwynne because he must do this really humane thing, perforce, inhumanely. The job was