as though the man belonged to some strange species.
"Handsome Ferdy! How do you lady-killers do it, anyway? I can't say that I am a bit the wiser now that you stand here before me, even though I see that the name was not wholly unmerited. Oh, I can see that Handsome Ferdy is one of those guys that women go crazy over. But why do they do it? And I thought that my Amanda was far, far above any such weakness as that. Why did she fall for you? Well, well! She might have done the decent thing, though: she, the both of you, might have waited until she had divorced poor me. But no, while I was gone, slaving away for her, you had to steal her."
"Steal her!"
Chantrell laughed—a laugh that cut Griswold to the very heart.
"Steal her? No man has to steal a woman from the likes of you! As for a divorce, you know that she was afraid—afraid that you would murder her, as you threatened her more than once that you would. If ever fear, stark fear, had a woman's heart in its grip, it had Amanda's. No use trying any camouflage with me, Griswold. I know."
"I suppose so. What a lot you know! But Fate has given you into my hands to wreak my vengeance upon you. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. You have had your hour of triumph. Now I shall have mine."
"So be it, then."
"You'll sing a very different tune before I am done with you, Handsome Ferdy. You'll curse the very hour that you were born into this world."
Ferdinand Chantrell laughed.
"You poor fool! Curse the hour I was born when I have known the heaven of a noble woman's love?"
"Bosh!" cut in Griswold, gnashing his teeth.
"Of course it is bosh to a warped, niggard soul such as yours. Love! You don't know what love is. You never can know."
"I should have had you to lesson me! But you are mine, mine at last, and you'll rue the day that you set eyes on Amanda!"
"Never!" cried Chantrell, his dark eyes flashing with a light that, to Griswold, for an instant, seemed to belong to some world more wonderful and mysterious than this. "She was mine—mine, mine! though I had her for one short year only. Rue the day? Nothing that you can do could make me do that. Rue the day that I saw Amanda? If I had a thousand thousand lives, and you a thousand thousand fiends to torture each one in a thousand thousand ways for a hundred thousand thousand years—if that were so, yet I would glory in my love for Amanda!"
"Gosh!" said Griswold. "They ought to have called you Ferdy the Hyperbolical."
For some moments, in silence, he gazed at Ferdinand Chantrell, then he said:
"But, poetics aside, was she, is she so very dear to you, though now she is?"
"An angel," Chantrell exclaimed, "in heaven!"
"A skull and some bones," Griswold said, "unless, that is, she is a few ashes in an urn."
Chantrell stood silent. A strange change was coming over the face and mien of Griswold. He thrust the weapon into his pocket and smiled at the other in a mysterious manner.
"So you thought that, I meant it?" he laughed. "Well, well!"
"What are you talking about?"
"That bit of play-acting of mine," Cuthbert Griswold told him. "So you thought that I meant it, Ferdy? Just a little joke, and"
"Joke!"
