“Extremely kind of you to enter my rooms uninvited, and furnish me with this list of moral deficiencies,” acknowledged the other with affected carelessness.  “But thus far you have failed to tell me anything strikingly new.  Am I to understand you have some particular object in this exchange of amenities?”

“Most assuredly.  It is to ask if such a person as you practically confess yourself to be—­homeless, associating only with the most despicable and vicious characters, and leading so uncertain and disreputable a life—­can be fit to assume charge of a girl, almost a woman, and mould her future?”

For a long, breathless moment Hampton stared incredulously at his questioner, crushing his cigar between his teeth.  Twice he started to speak, but literally choked back the bitter words burning his lips, while an uncontrollable admiration for the other’s boldness began to overcome his first fierce anger.

“By God!” he exclaimed at last, rising to his feet and pointing toward the door.  “I have shot men for less.  Go, before I forget your cloth.  You little impudent fool!  See here—­I saved that girl from death, or worse; I plucked her from the very mouth of hell; I like her; she ’s got sand; so far as I know there is not a single soul for her to turn to for help in all this wide world.  And you, you miserable, snivelling hypocrite, you little creeping Presbyterian parson, you want me to shake her!  What sort of a wild beast do you suppose I am?”

Wynkoop had taken one hasty step backward, impelled to it by the fierce anger blazing from those stern gray eyes.  But now he paused, and, for the only time on record, discovered the conventional language of polite society inadequate to express his needs.

“I think,” he said, scarcely realizing his own words, “you are a damned fool.”

Into Hampton’s eyes there leaped a light upon which other men had looked before they died,—­the strange mad gleam one sometimes sees in fighting animals, or amid the fierce charges of war.  His hand swept instinctively backward, closing upon the butt of a revolver beneath his coat, and for one second he who had dared such utterance looked on death.  Then the hard lines about the man’s mouth softened, the fingers clutching the weapon relaxed, and Hampton laid one opened hand upon the minister’s shrinking shoulder.

“Sit down,” he said, his voice unsteady from so sudden a reaction.  “Perhaps—­perhaps I don’t exactly understand.”

For a full minute they sat thus looking at each other through the fast dimming light, like two prize-fighters meeting for the first time within the ring, and taking mental stock before beginning their physical argument.  Hampton, with a touch of his old audacity of manner, was first to break the silence.

“So you think I am a damned fool.  Well, we are in pretty fair accord as to that fact, although no one before has ever ventured to state it quite so clearly in my presence.  Perhaps you will kindly explain?”