He struck the back of the chair she had vacated a vicious blow with his open hand.  “No, you spendthrift!  All there was to your grandfather when you buried him was a basket full of distillery stock, I tell you!  Old paper!  Can’t you hear me?  Old paper, old rags—­”

“You have sent me the same income,” she lifted her voice to interrupt; “you have made the same quarterly payments since his death that you made before.  If you knew, why did you do that?”

He had been shouting at her with the frantic and incredulous exasperation of an intolerant man utterly unused to opposition; his face empurpled, his forehead dripping, and his hands ruthlessly pounding the back of the chair; but this straight question stripped him suddenly of gesture and left him standing limp and still before her, pale splotches beginning to show on his hot cheeks.

“If you knew, why did you do it?” she repeated.  “You wrote me that my income was from dividends, and I knew and thought nothing about it; but if the stock which came to me was worthless, how could it pay dividends?”

“It did not,” he answered, huskily.  “That distillery stock, I tell you, isn’t worth the matches to burn it.”

“But there has been no difference in my income,” she persisted, steadily.  “Why?  Can you explain that to me?”

“Yes, I can,” he replied, and it seemed to her that he spoke with a pallid and bitter desperation, like a man driven to the wall.  “I can if you think you want to know.”

“I do.”

“I sent it.”

“Do you mean from you own—­”

“I mean it was my own money.”

She had not taken her eyes from his, which met hers straightly and angrily; and at this she leaned forward, gazing at him with profound scrutiny.

“Why did you send it?” she asked.

“Charity,” he answered, after palpable hesitation.

Her eyes widened and she leaned back against the lintel of the door, staring at him incredulously.  “Charity!” she echoed, in a whisper.

Perhaps he mistook her amazement at his performance for dismay caused by the sense of her own position, for, as she seemed to weaken before him, the strength of his own habit of dominance came back to him.  “Charity, madam!” he broke out, shouting intolerably.  “Charity, d’ye hear?  I was a friend of the man that made the money you and your grandfather squandered; I was a friend of Jonas Tabor, I say!  That’s why I was willing to support you for a year and over, rather than let a niece of his suffer.”

“`Suffer’!” she cried. “`Support’!  You sent me a hundred thousand francs!”

The white splotches which had mottled Martin Pike’s face disappeared as if they had been suddenly splashed with hot red.  “You go back to my house,” he said.  “What I sent you only shows the extent of my—­”

“Effrontery!” The word rang through the whole house, so loudly and clearly did she strike it, rang in his ears till it stung like a castigation.  It was ominous, portentous of justice and of disaster.  There was more than doubt of him in it:  there was conviction.