“Hamilton, please let us pass.  It would be a pity to edify your servants with a physical collision.”

Over the taut whiteness of the brother’s face went a wave of doubt.  He recognized confronting him a spirit as indomitable as his own.  Somehow his arrogance, under her gaze, withered and shrunk into a cheap bravado, and he realized it as such.  He spoke once more and his words came slowly.

“I shall not use force.  It is, of course, for you to decide.  I have perhaps loved you better than any other member of my family.  My pride in you has been triumphant.  That man who stands at your side came into my house and poisoned your heart against me.  He is a traitor and I have marked him for ruin.  Decide between us calmly, Mary, because when I resolve I do not deviate.”

“I have already decided,” she answered.  “Please let us pass.”

He drew aside and stood there motionless as the street-door opened and closed.  Afterward he walked slowly back into the room and stood restlessly on the great bear pelt, gazing into the cavernous hearth.  Then he dropped down into the tall Moorish chair where a little while before his sister had been sitting, her eyes brimming with joy.  He leaned forward and his hands fell limp from the wrists that rested limp on his knees.  Something had gone suddenly out of Hamilton Burton.  The eyes that stared into the blaze wore, for the first time, a trace of that fatigue and distress which portraits show in the eyes looking out from St. Helena.  Mary was gone; gone with his enemy to fight under his enemy’s colors!  Her motive bewildered him.  What was this love that so powerfully impelled her to desert her own blood?  Suddenly his mind flashed back to a kitchen tableau of a small girl breaking into a sudden tempest of tears, and a boy saying, “I mean to see that Mary gets whatever she wants out of life.”  Then quite irrelevantly a fragment of verse leaped into his memory and prickled it with irritation.

    “The Emperor there in his box of state, looked grave
      as though he had just then seen,
    The red flags fly from the city gates, where his eagles
      of bronze had been.”

His gaze dropped to the white fur of the rug and abstractedly he picked up his sister’s riding-crop and one glove.  She had dropped them when Jefferson Edwardes placed the ring on her finger.  Hamilton turned the things over in his hand and a groan escaped him.  Then suddenly that mood vanished.  He rose and paced the floor like a lion lashing itself into fury, and his eyes were fiercely tawny as he paced.

Well, she had chosen.  One thing remained possible.  The man responsible for this greatest sorrow and humiliation with which he had ever been visited should pay in full the score of reprisal.

With an abrupt impulse he sent for Paul and he was still pacing the room with quick, nervous strides when his brother arrived.  The younger man’s face was haggard and he cast a quick glance of trepidation about the room.