Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/190

 Bennet never had known anything but satisfactions with life, with himself, with his situation in the world; Bennet had never known what it was to want and to have to strive with all your will and strength.

Ethel flushed warmly, catching herself at this comparison; she could not remember ever having so analyzed a man in reference to another before.

"Well," Bennet said suddenly; and his habit of thus starting a sentence made her see in him a previously unmarked likeness to their grandfather, accentuated when Bennet gazed at her from across the table and hunched his chair slightly forward. "Tell me what our grandfather did to you this time besides not giving you the money, Eth."

Bennet had known that she had gone to St. Florentin for money; and she had informed him at Scott Street that she had not obtained it.

"Nothing to me, Ben," she said.

"What did he do, then?"

How could she tell him here? Not that any one need overhear them; for even the servants had withdrawn to a distance. Not that her statement would be too great a shock to him; he would not believe it. She could not make him credit it—so she was beginning to feel—because subtly it all had been becoming incredible to herself. At St. Florentin, seeing a solitary, wilful old man dwelling in exile with his wife and served by Miss Platt, her husband, and a couple of Indians, it had been possible to comprehend how her grandfather, threatened by the arrival of some one who sought Barney Loutrelle at Resurrection Rock, had dispatched Kincheloe to prevent the meeting. But in Chicago the whole air was different; the demeanor of hotel people and servants toward a grandson and a