The master choked up again, but, squeezing the cushion of the table in
his gloved hand, he went on:

"If you are a gentleman, I have only to tell you that I am her guardian,
and responsible for her career. You know as well as I do the kind of
life you offer her. As you may learn of anyone here, I have already
brought her out of an existence worse than death--out of the streets and
the contamination of vice. I am trying to do so again. Let us talk like
men. She has neither father, mother, sister, or brother. Are you seeking
to give her an equivalent for these?"

The man with the glazed hat examined the point of his cue, and then
looked around for somebody to enjoy the joke with him.

"I know that she is a strange, willful girl," continued the master, "but
she is better than she was. I believe that I have some influence over
her still. I beg and hope, therefore, that you will take no further
steps in this matter, but as a man, as a gentleman, leave her to me. I
am willing--" But here something rose again in the master's throat, and
the sentence remained unfinished.

The man with the glazed hat, mistaking the master's silence, raised his
head with a coarse, brutal laugh, and said in a loud voice:

"Want her yourself, do you? That cock won't fight here, young man!"

The insult was more in the tone than in the words, more in the glance
than tone, and more in the man's instinctive nature than all these. The
best appreciable rhetoric to this kind of animal is a blow. The master