this he would have found in her hostility to his efforts and her
repugnance to his person a temptation--a temptation to which he was
specially liable in regard to living things--to feel that it was his
right to curb the spirit and tame the rebellion of whatever was restive
to his control. There was something in this haughty, high-strung
creature, poising herself in silence to stand upright in the face of
fate, that would have called forth his impulse to dominate her will, to
subdue her lips to his own, if he had really cared. Fortunately, he
didn't care, and so could seek her welfare with detachment.

Turning slowly, she stood grasping the back of the chair from which she
had risen. He always remembered afterward that it was a chair of which
the flowing curves and rich interlacings of design contrasted with her
subtly emphasized simplicity. He had once had the morbid curiosity to
watch, in an English law-court, the face and attitude of a woman--a
surgeon's wife--standing in the dock to be sentenced to death. It seemed
to him now that Olivia Guion stood like her--with the same resoluteness,
not so much desperate as slightly dazed.

"Wasn't it for something of that kind--something wrong with
estates--that Jack Berrington was sent to prison?"

The question took him unawares. "I--I don't remember."

"I do. I should think you would. The trial was in all the papers. It was
the Gray estate. He was Mrs. Gray's trustee. He ruined the whole Gray
family."

"Possibly." He did his best to speak airily. "In the matter of estates
there are all sorts of hitches that can happen. Some are worse than