or must I treat him as a cur?"

Brett, without invitation, seated himself. He produced a cigarette and lit
it, adding greatly to Capella's irritation by his provoking calmness.

"Really," he said at last, "you amuse me."

"Silence!" he cried imperatively, when the Italian would have broken out
into a torrent of expostulations. "Listen to me, you vain fool!"

This method of address had the rare merit of achieving its object. Capella
was reduced to a condition of speechless rage.

"You consider yourself the aggrieved person, I suppose," went on the
Englishman, subsiding into a state of contemptuous placidity. "You neglect
your wife, make love to an honourable and pure-minded girl, stoop to the
use of unworthy taunts and even criminal innuendos, lose such control of
your passion as to lay sacrilegious hands upon Helen Layton, and yet you
resent the well-merited punishment administered to you by her affianced
husband. Were I a surgeon, Mr. Capella, I might take an anatomical
interest in your brain. As it is, I regard you as a psychological study in
latter-day blackguardism. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. You have not yet answered my question. Will Hume fight?"

"I should say that nothing would give him greater pleasure."

"Then you will arrange this matter? I can send a friend to you?"

"And if you do I will send the police to you, thus possibly anticipating
matters somewhat."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that my sole purpose in life just now is to lay hands on the man
who killed Sir Alan Hume-Frazer. Until that end is achieved, I will take
good care that your crude ideas of honour are dealt with, as they were
to-day, by the toe of a boot."

Capella was certainly a singular person. He listened unmoved to Brett's
threats and insults. He gave that snarling smile of his, and toyed
impatiently with his moustache.

"Your object in life does not concern me. Your courts tried their best to
hang the man who was responsible for his cousin's death, and failed. I
take it you decline this proffered duel?"

"Yes."

"Then I will fight David Hume in my own way. You have rejected the fair
alternative on his behalf. Caramba! We shall see now who wins. He will
never marry Helen."

"What did you mean just now when you said that he was 'responsible for his
cousin's death'? Is that an Italian way of describing a cold-blooded
murder?"

Capella leaned back and snarled silently again. It was a pity he had
cultivated tha