“If I am all the things you charge,” he suggested, “it’s a pretty full indictment and may warrant some discussion in passing.  Paul,” he added with a curt gesture of dismissal, “I hardly think this conversation will amuse you.”  The younger Burton rose and left the room, and as he went Mary took her place at the side of the man she had promised to marry and stood there as straight and unflinching as himself.

“Mr. Edwardes,” Hamilton began, “years ago I was a country boy, not yet fully able to translate the voices that spoke to me from within:  voices that told me I was a son of Destiny.  In a fashion, I owe you something as an interpreter of those voices.  You have just spoken more bitterly than it is easy for me to forgive.  Yet, I am anxious to talk temperately—­and God knows it will require an effort.  Will you meet me half-way?”

Jefferson Edwardes had not moved.  He was still white with anger, but the tempest that had brought his eruption of denunciation had passed, and he gravely bowed his head in assent.

“Very well.  We seem to hold standards of conduct irreconcilably divergent.  To my thinking you are a self-righteous and tedious dreamer and an impertinent preacher.”

Edwardes nodded and his answer was composed.  “We are all dreamers of varied sorts.  You are yourself the mightiest of dreamers:  because you make your visions realities.  Paul is a lesser dreamer—­almost a sleep-walker through life.  As for Mary—­” his voice grew suddenly tender—­“why, I first saw her in the sun and dust of a mountain roadside, dreaming of fairy princes.  I come last, but I’m a dreamer, too.  All my visions are simple, but I’ve tried to keep them compatible with honest ideals.”

“At least, you have hardly succeeded in keeping them to yourself.”  Hamilton Burton’s voice was still controlled, but it was witheringly bitter.  “Let me make myself clear.  In an unhappy marriage I see a fact where you see a gauzy sacrament.  I have become what I am, because to me the broad canvas alone is interesting, and picayunish prejudices are contemptible.  You bring into my house a visage of disapproval, and when you overhear private talk permit yourself to sneer.  It is intolerable.”

There was such a ring of sincerity in the voicing of this distorted reasoning that Edwardes almost smiled.

“And yet,” he answered, “until questioned I said nothing when I heard you offering to buy, as your brother’s plaything, the wife of another man—­a man who has served you with loyalty.”

“You sneered.  You allowed your sanctimonious lips to curl.  Had you dared, you would have rebuked me out of your cramped virtue.”

“Dared!” Once more Edwardes found his words leaping in fierce and uncontrolled anger.  His hand had been almost drawn back to strike the man who stood there treating him as an emperor might have treated a corporal, but as the curb slipped from his cruelly reined temper, he felt the girl’s hand on his arm, and stepped back, with every muscle in his body cramped under the tensity of his effort.  Yet his words were hardly less an assault than blows.