, to ask them through a lawyer--to him in
the prisoner's dock."

"You dislike him intensely?"

"I detest him for what he has done; but I do not despise him as you
suggest I should. Flamboyant, garrulous--I don't believe that. I think
him, feel him, to be a hard man, a strong man, and a bad man--if not
wholly bad."

"Yet you would put him in the prisoner's dock," interposed Kingsley
musingly, and wondering how he was to tell her that Lord Selden and
Kingsley Bey were one and the same person.

"Certainly. A man who commits public wrongs should be punished. Yet I am
sorry that a man so capable should be so inhuman."

"Your grandfather was inhuman," put in Kingsley. "He owned great West
Indian slave properties.

"He was culpable, and should have been punished--and was; for we are all
poor at last. The world has higher, better standards now, and we should
live up to them. Kingsley Bey should live up to them."

"I suppose we might be able to punish him yet," said Dicky meditatively.
"If Ismail turned rusty, we could soon settle him, I fancy. Certainly,
you present a strong case." He peered innocently into the distance.

"But could it be done--but would you?" she asked, suddenly leaning
forward. "If you would, you could--you could!"

"If I did it at all, if I could make up my mind to it, it should be done
thoroughly--no half measures."

"What would be the whole measures?" she asked eagerly, but with a
certain faint shrinking, for Dicky seemed cold-blooded.

"Of course you never could tell what would happen when Ismail throws the
slipper. This isn't a country where things are cut and dried, and done
according to Hoyle. You get a new combination every time you pull a
string. Where there's no system and a thousand methods you have to run
risks. Kingsley Bey might get mangled in the machinery."

She shrank a little. "It is all barbarous."

"Well, I don't know. He is guilty, isn't he? You said you would like
to see him in the prisoner's dock. You would probably convict him of
killing as well as slavery. You would torture him with prison, and then
hang him in the end. Ismail would probably get into a rage--pretended,
of course--and send an army against him. Kingsley would make a fight for
it, and lose his head--all in the interest of a sudden sense of duty on
the part of the Khedive. All Europe would applaud--all save England,
and what could she do? Can she defend slavery? There'll be no kid-gloved
justice meted out