He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his
thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and
cried in shame and rage.

It was the one real shadow in his life. Ill luck and good luck had been
taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived,
own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterwards to a man whom
he hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him. Jopp owned him. For
some years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown
together in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche. It was gall and
wormwood to Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the
man was as great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character;
but withal acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for
commercial sharpness which would be called by another name in a
different civilisation. They met constantly, and O'Ryan always put
a hand on himself, and forced himself to be friendly. Once when Jopp
became desperately ill there had been--though he fought it down, and
condemned himself in every term of reproach--a sense of relief in the
thought that perhaps his ancient debt would now be cancelled. It had
gone on so long. And Constantine Jopp had never lost an opportunity of
vexing him, of torturing him, of giving veiled thrusts, which he knew
O'Ryan could not resent. It was the constant pin-prick of a mean soul,
who had an advantage of which he could never be dispossessed--unless the
ledger was balanced in some inscrutable way.

Apparently bent on amusement only, and hiding his hatred from his
colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke
of the play; but it was the brains of Dick Fergus which had carried it
out, written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the
back curtain--for he was an engineer and electrician. Neither he nor
Holden had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp. There
was only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to
whom Terry had once told all. At the last moment Fergus had interpolated
certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at
rehearsal. These referred to Apollo. He had a shrewd notion that Jopp
had an idea of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they
were; and he was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry,
had tried to poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip
about a little widow at Jansen, thirty mi