"Kick me out!" he cried, in a voice of lamentation. "Kick me out like the rest ... I deserve it.... I am a loafer ... a sluggard.... I waste God's daylight.... My cows all have too long legs.... So the critics say ... but I swear it isn't true.... I take my oath to you, an honourable man, that cows have long legs." "Of course, dear old fellow; calm yourself." "Now I have given up painting them with legs at all ... I make them legless, like seals.... Serves those blackguard critics right.... But you are my salvation.... Say you will be on my side--promise." Leo promised everything as he pushed the drunkard firmly back in his chair. "You will see to the man, uncle." He growled out an insolent answer. Leo felt the blood mount hotly to his temples. But a voice within him said, "Keep quiet. Don't embitter this hour of homecoming." So he forced himself to calmness as he said-- "I beg that you will remember your position, my dear uncle." The old man spat copiously around. Then with a defiant grin, that was a sort of challenge, he said-- "It seems to me that I know my position better than you do, my boy. At any rate, I must ask you not to take me to task again, before other people, else I shall be bound to jog your memory a little." A shudder ran through Leo's frame. Again the ghost of his old sin rose before him. "Sleep off your debauch," he murmured, and strode hastily to the door. It was quiet and dark in the courtyard. The cool night breezes fanned Leo's burning brow, but he was not conscious of it. Foaming at the mouth, with clenched fists he passed the stables, whence now and again the snort of a dreaming animal or the rattle of a chain fell on his ear. The wrath which hitherto it had needed the exercise of all his self-command to suppress, now that he was alone, broke forth the more violently. He had leisure to rave himself out. No one disturbed him, and it was only the iron head of a pole-axe which he nearly ran into in the darkness which brought him to his senses. Suddenly he laughed out loud. The old Yankee game, "For Life or Death," at which he had so often played so audaciously and won on the other side of the world, should serve him in tame old Europe too, to stop the mouth of his refractory conscience. So, folding his arms as content as a schoolboy who has bethought him of some new trick to play off on a comrade, he walked up the incline to the castle, which stood out, a solid black mass of masonry, against the dark blue of the midnight sky. Behind him the farm buildings and offices formed a huge semicircle, grouped round the reed-grown pond, whose surface reflected the faint uncertain dawn of midnight A solitary light still shone from one of the castle's upstair windows.