She shook her head.  “No—­but there is such a thing as suffocating the souls in them with material kindness and bodily luxuries,” she answered.

“You have been spending a great deal of time of late with Jefferson Edwardes.”  The manner of the man underwent one of its swift changes and grew cool and acid.  “Perhaps he has been talking to you as he undertook to talk to me last night.”

A light as dominant as that in her brother’s came to Mary Burton’s pupils.

“Perhaps,” she replied.

“I’m not at all sure that I care for this intimate association with Mr. Edwardes,” he curtly announced.  “I am not enamored of the vaporings of visionary and self-ordained preachers.”

“Possibly it is not necessary that you should be,” the girl suggested.  “Maybe for the purpose of my own friendships, it is enough that I like him.  I hardly think you would understand his type, Hamilton.”

Her brother’s face reddened dangerously.

“I should call my intelligence human,” he declared.  “I’ve been able to make certain use of it.”

“Call it superhuman if you like—­or inhuman, yet I hardly think it can truly gage that type of gallant gentleman who has kept his dreams untainted and his ideals clean.”

The man who had found the world a thing upon which he could stamp his hall-mark stood for a while without speaking; then his voice came keyed to a satirical coldness.

“Whatever your estimate may be of my ability to understand this peerless gentleman and chevalier, one thing I can do.  I can crush him into pulp.  If he has poisoned against me the minds of my own family, I swear to you that I both can and will nail him to the cross of utter ruin.  You had better warn your knightly friend, Mary, that the days of grail-seeking are ended.”

The girl came to her feet and her eyes were stars of scorn as she faced the man whose sudden anger had brought out the arteries corded on his temples.

“Such talk,” she said, “belongs to the shambles of your cut-throat finance.  I have no wish to listen to it.”  Gradually the scornful light in Mary’s pupils hardened and brightened into the fighting fire that might come into those of a tigress whose den has been threatened.  Her delicate nostrils quivered and her cheeks flamed.

“Five minutes ago you were inquiring what costly gifts my heart desired, that you might buy them for me with your money.  Well, there is something I want that I haven’t got—­and your millions can’t buy it.  I want decent love.  You had me schooled into a Circe and you almost killed my soul.  Thank God, some one came in time, some one whose thoughts are above sordid conquest.  Some one who wanted to save me from the legalized prostitution of a loveless marriage.  And because he has said to your face what all men say in your absence, you talk of crucifying him.”  She broke off and her breath came fast.

Hamilton Burton gazed silently for a moment, then he said shortly: