“I think I know what that means,” Roderick answered.  He turned away, threw himself on a rickety chair, and sat for some moments with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.  “Work—­work?” he said at last, looking up, “ah, if I could only begin!” He glanced round the room a moment and his eye encountered on the mantel-shelf the vivid physiognomy of Mr. Barnaby Striker.  His smile vanished, and he stared at it with an air of concentrated enmity.  “I want to begin,” he cried, “and I can’t make a better beginning than this!  Good-by, Mr. Striker!” He strode across the room, seized a mallet that lay at hand, and before Rowland could interfere, in the interest of art if not of morals, dealt a merciless blow upon Mr. Striker’s skull.  The bust cracked into a dozen pieces, which toppled with a great crash upon the floor.  Rowland relished neither the destruction of the image nor his companion’s look in working it, but as he was about to express his displeasure the door opened and gave passage to a young girl.  She came in with a rapid step and startled face, as if she had been summoned by the noise.  Seeing the heap of shattered clay and the mallet in Roderick’s hand, she gave a cry of horror.  Her voice died away when she perceived that Rowland was a stranger, but she murmured reproachfully, “Why, Roderick, what have you done?”

Roderick gave a joyous kick to the shapeless fragments.  “I ’ve driven the money-changers out of the temple!” he cried.

The traces retained shape enough to be recognized, and she gave a little moan of pity.  She seemed not to understand the young man’s allegory, but yet to feel that it pointed to some great purpose, which must be an evil one, from being expressed in such a lawless fashion, and to perceive that Rowland was in some way accountable for it.  She looked at him with a sharp, frank mistrust, and turned away through the open door.  Rowland looked after her with extraordinary interest.

CHAPTER II.  Roderick

Early on the morrow Rowland received a visit from his new friend.  Roderick was in a state of extreme exhilaration, tempered, however, by a certain amount of righteous wrath.  He had had a domestic struggle, but he had remained master of the situation.  He had shaken the dust of Mr. Striker’s office from his feet.

“I had it out last night with my mother,” he said.  “I dreaded the scene, for she takes things terribly hard.  She does n’t scold nor storm, and she does n’t argue nor insist.  She sits with her eyes full of tears that never fall, and looks at me, when I displease her, as if I were a perfect monster of depravity.  And the trouble is that I was born to displease her.  She does n’t trust me; she never has and she never will.  I don’t know what I have done to set her against me, but ever since I can remember I have been looked at with tears.  The trouble is,” he went on, giving a twist to his moustache,