Alan bowed assent.  It tallied all too well.  The lad he had insulted, jeered at, hated with instinctive hate, was his cousin, John Massey, the third, whom he had told the other was quite dead.  John Massey was very much alive and was the rightful heir to the fortune which Alan Massey was spending as the heavens had spent rain yesterday.

It was worse than that.  If the other was no longer nameless, had the right to the same fine, old name that Alan himself bore, and had too often disgraced, the barrier between him and Tony Holiday was swept away.  That was the bitterest drop in the cup.  No wonder he hated Dick—­hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity.  He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field?  It was he—­Alan Massey—­that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble, wayward, erratic, unclean?  Would it not be John rather than Alan Massey Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all?  This ugly, venomous, sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow of his evil old hand.

The other was watching him narrowly, evidently striving to follow his thoughts.

“Well?” he asked.  “Going to beat me at my own game, give your cousin his due?”

“No,” curtly.

“Queer,” mused the man.  “A month ago I would have understood it.  It would have seemed sensible enough to hold on to the cold cash at any risk.  Now it looks different.  Money is filthy stuff, man.  It is what they put on dead eye-lids to keep them down.  Sometimes we put it on our own living lids to keep us from seeing straight.  You are sure the money’s worth so much to you, Alan Massey?”

The man’s eyes burned livid, like coals.  It was a strange and rather sickening thing, Alan Massey thought, to hear him talk like this after having lived the rottenest kind of a life, sunk in slime for years.

“The money is nothing to me,” he flung back.  “Not now.  I thought it was worth considerable when I drove that devilish bargain with you to keep it.  It has been worse than nothing, if you care to know.  It killed my art—­the only decent thing about me—­the only thing I had a right to take honest pride in.  John Massey might have every penny of it to-morrow for all I care if that were all there were to it.”

“What else is there?” probed the old man.

“None of your business,” snarled Alan.  Not for worlds would he have spoken Tony Holiday’s name in this spot, under the baleful gleam of those dying eyes.

The man chuckled maliciously.

“You don’t need to tell me, I know.  There’s always a woman in it when a man takes the path to Hell.  Does she want money?  Is that why you must hang on to the filthy stuff?”

“She doesn’t want anything except what I can’t give her, thanks to you and myself—­the love of a decent man.”