and; your shirt is lockram, and you wear no coat at
all: _ergo_, saith a world of pretty fellows, we are beings of separate
planets. 'As the cloth is, the man is,'--to which doctrine I am at times
heretic. I have some store of yellow metal, and spend my days in ridding
myself of it,--a feat which you have accomplished. A goodly number of
acres is also counted unto me, but in the end my holding and your holding
will measure the same. I walk a level road; you have met with your
precipice, and, bruised by the fall, you move along stony ways; but
through the same gateway we go at last. Fate, not I, put you here. Why
should you hate me who am of your order?"

MacLean left the table, and twice walked the length of the room, slowly
and with knitted brows. "If you mean the world-wide order,--the order of
gentlemen,"--he said, coming to a pause with the breadth of the table
between him and Haward, "we may have that ground in common. The rest is
debatable land. I do not take you for a sentimentalist or a redresser of
wrongs. I am your storekeeper, purchased with that same yellow metal of
which you so busily rid yourself; and your storekeeper I shall remain
until the natural death of my term, two years hence. We are not
countrymen; we own different kings; I may once have walked your level
road, but you have never moved in the stony ways; my eyes are blue, while
yours are gray; you love your melting Southern music, and I take no joy
save in the pipes; I dare swear you like the smell of lilies which I
cannot abide, and prefer fair hair in women where I would choose the dark.
There is no likeness between us. Why, then"--

Haward smiled, and drawing two glasses toward him slowly filled them with
wine. "It is true," he said, "that it is not my intention to become a
petitioner for the pardon of a rebel to his serene and German Majesty the
King; true also that I like the fragrance of the lily. I have my fancies.
Say that I am a man of whim, and that, living in a lonely house set in a
Sahara of tobacco fields, it is my whim to desire the acquaintance of the
only gentleman within some miles of me. Say that my fancy hath been caught
by a picture drawn for me a week agone; that, being a philosopher, I play
with the idea that your spirit, knife in hand, walked at my elbow for ten
years, and I knew it not. Say that the idea has for me a curious
fascination. Say, finally, that I plume myself that, given the chance, I
might break down this airy