“The sneak!” he said! “he dares not show his face when I’m at home, but the minute he thinks me safe, gets into my room and lies in my chair! Drunk, too, by Jove!” he added, as a fume from the sleeper’s breath reached the nostrils beginning to dilate with wrath. “What can that wife of mine be about, letting the rascal go on like this! She is faultless except in giving me such a son—and then helping him to fool me!”

He forgot the old forger of a bygone century! His side of the house had, I should say, a good deal more to do with what was unsatisfactory in the lad’s character than his wife’s.

The devil saw his chance, sprang up, and mastered the father.

“The snoring idiot!” he growled, and seizing his boy by the shoulder and neck he roughly shook him awake.

The father had been drinking, not what would some have considered too much, but enough to add to the fierceness of his wrath. He had come into the study straight from the stable, and when the poor creature looked up half awake and saw his father standing over him with a heavy whip in his hand, he was filled with a terror that nearly paralyzed him. He sat and stared with white, trembling lips and red eyes, and a look that confirmed the belief of the father that he was drunk.

“Get out of there, you dog!” cried his father, and with one sweep of his powerful arm, half dragged, half hurled him from the chair. He fell on the floor, and in weakness mixed with cowardice lay where he fell. The devil—I am sorry to have to refer to him so often, but he played a notable part in the affair, and I should be more sorry not to acknowledge his part in it—rushed at once into the brain and heart and limbs of the father’s abandoned house.

When Raymount saw the creature who had turned his previously happy life to shame lying at his feet, he became instantly conscious of the whip in his hand. Without a moment’s pause of hesitation, he raised his arm high over him and brought it down with a fierce lash on the quivering flesh of his son. The boy richly deserved the punishment, but God would not have struck him that way. There was the poison of hate, not the leaven of love, in the blow. He again raised his arm aloft, but as it descended, the piercing shriek that broke from Corney’s lips startled even the possessing demon, and the violence of the blow was broken. But the lash of the whip found his face and marked it for a time worse than the smallpox.