"Nobody but a fool could
hate Betty," the letter had read. And at the instant he had read the
words he had known that he didn't hate her. But he was a fool, just
the same; he was a fool for treating her as he did--as Dade had said.
He had known that all along; he knew that was the reason why he had
curbed his rage when it would have driven him to commit some rash
action. He had been a fool, but had he let himself go he would have
been a bigger one.
Betty had appraised him correctly--"sized him up," in Dade's idiomatic
phraseology--and knew that his vicious impulses were surface ones that
had been acquired and not inherited, as he had thought. And he was
strangely pleased.
He looked once around the room, noting the spotless cleanliness of it
before he blew out the light. And then he stepped across the floor and
into the dining-room, tip-toeing toward the stairs, that he might
awaken no one. But he halted in amazement when he reached a point near
the center of the room, for he saw, under the threshold of the door
that led from the dining-room to his father's office, a weak,
flickering beam of light.
The door was tightly closed. He knew from the fact that no light shone
through it except from the space between the bottom of it and the
threshold that it was barred, for he had locked the door during the
time he was repairing the house, and had satisfied himself that it
could not be tightly closed unless barred.
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