‘Hullo, Louis!’

There was a pause, and then came the reply in a tone which might have been ferocious or facetious: 

‘Well, my young friend?’

It was indeed Louis Ravengar.  Dishevelled, fatigued, and unstrung, he formed a sinister contrast to Hugo, fresh from repose, cold water and music, and also to the spirit of the beautiful summer morning itself, which at that unspoilt hour seemed always to sojourn for a space in the belvedere.  The sun glinted joyously on the golden ornament of the dome, and on Hugo’s smooth hair, but it revealed without pity the stains on Ravengar’s flaccid collar and the disorder of his evening clothes and opera-hat.

He was a fairly tall man, with thin gray hair round the sides of his head, but none on the crown nor on his face, the chief characteristics of which were the square jaw, the extremely long upper lip, the flat nose, and the very small blue-gray eyes.  He looked sixty, and was scarcely fifty.  He looked one moment like a Nonconformist local preacher who had mistaken his vocation; but he was nothing of the kind.  He looked 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