the next moment like a good hater and a great scorner of scruples; and
he was.

These two men had not exchanged a word, had not even seen each other,
save at the rarest intervals, for nearly a quarter of a century. They
were the principals in a quarrel of the most vivid, satanic, and
incurable sort known to anthropological science--the family quarrel--and
the existence of this feud was a proof of the indisputable truth that it
sometimes takes less than two to make a quarrel. For, though Owen Hugo
was not absolutely an angel, Ravengar had made it single-handed.

The circumstances of its origin were quite simple. When Louis Ravengar
was nine years old, his father, a widower, married a widow with one
child, aged six. That child was Hugo. The two lads, violently different
in temperament--the one gloomy and secretive, the other buoyant and
frank--with no tie of blood or of affection, were forced by destiny to
grow up together in the same house, and by their parents even to sleep
in the same room. They were never apart, and they loathed each other.
Louis regarded young Owen as an interloper, and acted towards him as
boys and tigers will towards interlopers weaker than themselves. The
mischief was that Owen, in course of years, became a great favourite
with his step-father. This roused Louis to a fury which was the more
dangerous in that Owen had begun to overtake him in strength, and the
fury could, therefore, find no outlet. Then Owen's mother died, and
Ravengar, senior, married again--a girl this time, who soon discovered
that the household in which she had planted herself was far too
bellicose to be comfortable. She abandoned her husband, and sought
consolation and sympathy with another widower, who also was blessed with
offspring. Such is the foolishness of women. You cannot cure a woman of
being one. But it must be said in favour of the third Mrs. Ravengar and