It was from the flame in Thor's eyes that Claude leaped back a half-pace, though he steadied himself against a small table covered up from the accumulation of summer's dust by a piece of common calico. Giving himself time enough to have deliberately counted twenty, Thor subdued the impulse of the muscles as well as that of speech. "Who told you that?" he asked, at last, in the tone he might have used of some matter of no importance.
"Who do you think?"
"There's only one person who could have told you—"
"Oh, you admit as much as that, do you? There is a person who could have told me?"
"Yes, I admit as much as that—but you must have misunderstood her."
Thor's dignity and self-restraint were not without an effect that might eventually have made for peace had not the brother's conscience been screaming for a scapegoat on which to lay a portion of his sins. For him alone the entire weight had become intolerable. Thor had been known to accept such vicarious burdens before now. In the hope that he would do so again, Claude answered, tauntingly:
"I didn't misunderstand her when she said you were making me a cat's-paw to do what you wouldn't do yourself. What kind of stuff are you made of, Thor? You go flaunting your money before a poor little girl who you know can't resist it, and then, when you get her willing to do God knows what, you push her off on me and want to pay me for the job of relieving you of your dirty work. After you've dragged her in the dust she's still considered good enough for me—"
"Stop!"
The roar of the monosyllable echoed through the empty house, while Thor strode forward, the devil in him loose. With the skill of a toreador in throwing his cloak into the eyes of an infuriated bull, Claude snatched the calico strip from the table beside which he stood and flung it in Thor's face. The result was to check the latter in his advance, giving Claude time to dart nimbly to the other side of the room. As Thor stared about him, dazed by his rage, he bore out still further the resemblance to a maddened animal in the bull-ring.
Fear struggled in Claude's heart with the lust for retaliation. Like Thor himself, he knew the minute to be one in which he could work off a thousand unpaid scores that had been heaping themselves up since childhood. For the time being it seemed as if he could not only make the scapegoat bear his sins, but stab him to the heart while he did it.