She stood looking up at him, the folded yellow paper in her hand, driven by race instinct to fight in the open, to get into the enemy’s country, especially if McDermott were the enemy.

With an angry light in her eyes she called for a storm-cloak and demanded a cab, setting Nora and her remonstrances aside with abrupt decision.  Giving the cabman the address of McDermott’s down-town offices, she sat in the dark of the carriage with the paper Barney had given her clutched in her hand, with neither consideration of the coming interview nor formulated plans.  In a vague way she knew that people stared after her, as she went through the corridor of the great building, the hood of her storm-cloak thrown back.  Unminding, she rapped at McDermott’s private door.  She had no misgiving about his being there.  She knew in some way, before she left her apartment, that he would be there when she arrived.

“Come in!” he called, curtly.

She entered to find him alone, standing by the window looking absent-mindedly over the snowy chimney-tops, as though projecting a holiday.

“By all the saints at once!” he cried, gayly, at sight of her.  “Here have I been ruminating on the sins of the fathers; on the triumphant fifth act, with vice punished and virtue rewarded at the fall of the curtain, when you enter!” And here her silence and pallor and accusing eyes stopped his talking.  “What is it, Katrine?” he demanded.

“Did you bring this trouble to Mr. Ravenel?” she asked, her eyes filled with a dangerous light which in a second was matched by the blaze in his.

“Do you mean that ye think it was I who struck a man in the back in the way this thing was done?” he cried, bringing his closed fist down on the newspaper, which lay on the desk before him, in a splendid kind of anger.  “How little you know me, after all!” he said, reproach in his voice.  “How little ye know me!  I’ve had neither art or part in it, nor suspicion of it until to-day.  You’ll be wanting proof of it!” he went on, a bit of scorn in his voice.  “If so, mayhap the common-sense of the situation will appeal to you, though I don’t know.”  He was angry, and she felt the brunt of it in these words.  “Look you!” he continued.  “Why should I be ruining an estate that I’m trying to get possession of?  It would be a fool’s part to play.”

“Forgive me, McDermott!” she cried.  “Oh, forgive me!  I want no further proof.  Your face is enough for me.  But I’m beside myself with grief.”

“I suppose,” he continued, “that you reasoned I was capable of this because of that affair about the land on the other side of the river?”

“I did think of it,” Katrine admitted.  “Forgive me for it, Dermott, but I did think of it!”

“Do you know for whom I bought that land, Katrine Dulany?  For your father—­no less.  It was got with the hope of helping him.  It stands in his name in the State records to-day.”