"Oh no! father!..."

"Of course she shall go. I never heard anything so dishonest in my
life!..."

Joan remembered that little conversation until the end of her life. And
with reason.

The door was flung open. Some one came hurriedly in, then stopped, with a
sudden arrested impulse, looking at them. It was Falk.

Falk was a very good-looking man--fair hair, light blue eyes like his
father's, slim and straight and quite obviously fearless. It was that
quality of courage that struck every one who saw him; it was not only that
he feared, it seemed, no one and nothing, but that he went a step further
than that, spending his life in defying every one and everything, as a
practised dueller might challenge every one he met in order to keep his
play in practice. "I don't like young Brandon," Mrs. Sampson said. "He
snorts contempt at you...."

He was only twenty-one, a contemptuous age. He looked as though he had
been living in that house for weeks, although, as a fact, he had just
driven up, after a long and tiresome journey, in an ancient cab through
the pouring rain. The Archdeacon gazed at his son in a bewildered,
confused amaze, as though he, a convinced sceptic, were suddenly
confronted, in broad daylight, with an undoubted ghost.

"What's the matter?" he said at last. "Why are you here?"