eft--that city which boasted with Rome that it was built upon a cluster
of seven hills--to the lines of embarkation that were building about
the fort of St. Julian on his left. Then he turned, facing again the
spacious, handsome room with its heavy, semi-ecclesiastical furniture,
and Sir Terence, who, hunched in his chair at the ponderously carved
black writing-table, scowled fiercely at nothing.

"What are you going to do, sir?" he inquired.

Sir Terence shrugged impatiently and heaved himself up in his chair.

"Nothing," he growled.

"Nothing?"

The interrogation, which seemed almost to cover a reproach, irritated
the adjutant.

"And what the devil can I do?" he rapped.

"You've pulled Dick out of scrapes before now."

"I have. That seems to, have been my principal occupation ever since I
married his sister. But this time he's gone too far. What can I do?"

"Lord Wellington is fond of you," suggested Captain Tremayne. He was
your imperturbable young man, and he remained as calm now as O'Moy was
excited. Although by some twenty years the adjutant's junior, there was
between O'Moy and himself, as well as between Tremayne and the Butler
family, with which he was remotely connected, a strong friendship, which
was largely responsible for the captain's present appointment as Sir
Terence's military secretary.

O'Moy looked at him, and looked away. "Yes," he agreed. "But he's still
fonder of law and order and military discipline, and I should only
be imperilling our friendship by pleading with him for this young
blackguard."

"The young blackguard is your brother-in-law," Tremayne reminded him.

"Bad luck to you, Tremayne, don't I know it? Besides, what is there I
can do?" he asked again, and ended testily: "Faith, man, I don't know
what you're thinking of."

"I'm thinking of Una," said Captain Tremayne in that composed way of
his, and the words fell like cold water upon the hot iron of O'Moy's
anger.

The man who can receive with patience a reproach, implicit or explicit,
of being wanting in consideration towards his wife is comparatively
rare, and never a man of O'Moy's temperament and circumstances.
Tremayne's reminder stung him sharply, and the more sharply because of
the strong friendship that existed between Tremayne and Lady O'Moy. That
friendship had in the past been a thorn in O'Moy's flesh. In the days of
his courtship he had known a fierce jealousy of Tremayne, beholding in
him for a time a rival