That night Dick did not come at all. In the morning when her father appeared, Elizabeth saw that he was haggard and old. As he walked heavily toward his waiting carriage, her love and pity for him received a sudden impetus. Dick did not return until the next evening, and the following morning he came down just as his father was leaving the house. If Ward heard his son’s step on the stairs, he did not turn, but went on out, got into his brougham, and sank back wearily on its cushions. It happened that Elizabeth came into the hall at that moment; she saw her father, and she saw her brother coming down the stairs, dressed faultlessly in new clothes and smoking a cigarette. As Elizabeth saw him, so easy and unconcerned, her anger suddenly blazed out, her eyes flashed, and she took one quick step toward him. His fresh, ruddy face wore a smile, but as she confronted him and held out one arm in dramatic rigidity and pointed toward her father, Dick halted and his smile faded. "Look at him!" Elizabeth said, pointing to her father. "Look at him! Do you know what you’re doing?" "Why, Bess"--Dick began, surprised. "You’re breaking his heart, that’s what you’re doing!" She stood there, her eyes menacing, her face flushed, her arm extended. The carriage was rolling down the drive and her father had gone, but Elizabeth still had the vision of his bent frame as he got into his carriage. "Did you see him?" she went on. "Did you see how he’s aging, how much whiter his hair has grown in the last few weeks, how his figure has bent? You’re killing him, that’s what you’re doing, killing him inch by inch. Why can’t you do it quick, all at once, and be done with it? That would be kinder, more merciful!" Her lip curled in sarcasm. Dick stood by the newel-post, his face white, his lips open as if to speak. "You spend your days in idleness and your nights in dissipation. You won’t work. You won’t do anything. You are disgracing your family and your name. Can’t you see it, or won’t you?" "Why, Bess," Dick began, "what’s the--" She looked at him a moment; he was like her mother, so good-natured, so slow to anger. His attitude, his expression, infuriated her; words seemed to have no effect, and in her fury she felt that she must make him see, that she must force him to realize what he was doing--force him to acknowledge his fault--force him to be good. "Of course, you’d just stand there!" she said. "Why don’t you say something? You know what you’re doing--you know it better than I. I should think you’d be ashamed to look a sister in the face!" Dick had seen Elizabeth angry before, but never quite like this. Slowly within him his own anger was mounting. What right, he thought, had she to take him thus to task--him, a man? He drew himself up, his face suddenly lost its pallor and a flush of scarlet mottled it. Strangely, in that same instant, Elizabeth’s face became very white.