“S’pose she has?”

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 felt this, and, with his pent-up, nervous energy finding expression in the one act, he struck the brute full in his grinning face.  The blow sent the glazed hat one way and the cue another, and tore the glove and skin from the master’s hand from knuckle to joint.  It opened up the corners of the fellow’s mouth, and spoilt the peculiar shape of his beard for some time to come.

There was a shout, an imprecation, a scuffle, and the trampling of many feet.  Then the crowd parted right and left, and two sharp quick reports followed each other in rapid succession.  Then they closed again about his opponent, and the master was standing alone.  He remembered picking bits of burning wadding from his coat sleeve with his left hand.  Someone was holding his other hand.  Looking at it, he saw it was still bleeding from the blow, but his fingers were clenched around the handle of a glittering knife.  He could not remember when or how he got it.

The man who was holding his hand was Mr. Morpher.  He hurried the master to the door, but the master held back, and tried to tell him as well as he could with his parched throat about “Mliss.”  “It’s all right, my boy,” said Mr. Morpher.  “She’s home!” And they passed out into the street together.  As they walked along Mr. Morpher said that Mliss had come running into the house a few moments before, and had dragged him out, saying that somebody was trying to kill the master at the Arcade.  Wishing to be alone, the master promised Mr. Morpher that he would not seek the agent again that night, and parted from him, taking the road toward the schoolhouse.  He was surprised in nearing it to find the door open—­still more surprised to find Mliss sitting there.