conscious voice. "I didn't know that I was that sort of fellow.
The temptation was very great. I nearly gave in and let him do it.
He was a stronger man than I. You know--we did not get on well
together. He always hoped that I would turn out a literary sort of
fellow, and I suppose he was disappointed. I tried at one time, but
I found it was no good. From indifference it turned almost to
hatred. He disliked me intensely, and I am afraid I did not care
for him very much."

She nodded her head, and he went on. Perhaps he could see her
through the maidenhair fern. She was getting more and more
interested in this man. He obviously disliked talking of himself--a
pleasant change which aroused her curiosity. He was so unlike other
men, and his life seemed to be different from the lives of the men
whom she had known--stronger, more intense, and of greater variety
of incident.

"Of course," he went on, "his death was really of enormous advantage
to me. They say that I shall have two or three thousand a year,
instead of five hundred, paid quarterly at Cox's. He could not
prevent it coming to me. It was my mother's money. He would have
done so if he could, for we never disguised our antipathy for each
other. Yet we lived together, and--and I had the nursing of him."

Millicent was listening gravely without interrupting--like a man.
She had the gift of adapting herself to her environments in a marked
degree.

"And," he added curtly, "no one knows how much I wanted that three
thousand a year."