fellow," opined the adjutant.

"Thrash?" echoed Samoval. His sensitive lip curled in disdain. "To use
your hands upon a man!" He shuddered in sheer disgust. "To one of
my temperament it would be impossible, and men of my temperament are
plentiful, I think."

"But if you were thrashed yourself?" Tremayne asked him, and the light
in his grey eyes almost hinted at a dark desire to be himself the
executioner.

Samoval's dark, handsome eyes considered the captain steadily. "To be
thrashed myself?" he questioned. "My dear Captain, the idea of having
hands laid upon me, soiling me, brutalising me, is so nauseating, so
repugnant, that I assure you I should not hesitate to shoot the man who
did it just as I should shoot any other wild beast that attacked me.
Indeed the two instances are exactly parallel, and my country's courts
would uphold in such a case the justice of my conduct."

"Then you may thank God," said O'Moy, "that you are not under British
jurisdiction."

"I do," snapped Samoval, to make an instant recovery: "at least so far
as the matter is concerned." And he elaborated: "I assure you, sirs, it
will be an evil day for the nobility of any country when its Government
enacts against the satisfaction that one gentleman has the right to
demand from another who offends him."

"Isn't the conversation rather too bloodthirsty for a luncheon-table?"
wondered Lady O'Moy. And tactlessly she added, thinking with flattery
to mollify Samoval and cool his obvious heat: "You are yourself such a
famous swordsman, Count."

And then Tremayne's dislike of the man betrayed him into his deplorable
phrase.

"At the present time Portugal is in urgent need of her famous swordsmen
to go against the French and not to increase the disorders at home."

A silence complete and ominous followed the rash words, and Samoval,
white to the lips, pondered the imperturbable captain with a baleful
eye.

"I think," he said at last, speaking slowly and softly, and picking
his words with care, "I think that is innuendo. I should be relieved,
Captain Tremayne, to hear you say that it is not."

Tremayne was prompt to give him the assurance. "No innuendo at all. A
plain statement of fact."

"The innuendo I suggested lay in the application of the phrase. Do you
make it personal to myself?"

"Of course not," said Sir Terence, cutting in and speaking sharply.
"What an assumption!"

"I am asking Captain Tremayne," the Count insisted, with grim f