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CHAPTER XX.
MALDUKE SETS HIS TRAP.
Is it your moral of life?
Such a web simple and subtle,
Weave we on earth here in impotent strife,
Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle,
Death ending all with a knife!"—Browning.
As the two friends sat at breakfast, Tom related the incident that the sight of Gwyneth's face had recalled.
"Hearing that you were engaged with some meeting or other, and the doctor being over at O'Lochlan's, I strolled down to the Dowlings'. They had a score or two of these precious people in to their 'Monthly Social,' as they called it."
"It's very good of Dowling," said Frank. "He only half likes it all. He has certain old-fashioned notions about the movement."
"So I should think. He talked pretty straight to one or two last night. Mrs. Bowling and her pretty daughter," continued Tom, "gathered the women into the big kitchen, explaining some kind of new-fangled style of sewing. The men were with Bowling smoking on the verandah.
"One of them—named Malduke, I think—was treating the company to some wild rhodomontade of a lightly-flavoured socialistic order. Bowling set the fellow down
