, and he cried, "You impudent young dog!"

"Do not speak to me until you've been introduced. You're always
forcing your acquaintance upon someone, Roland Macassar," said Tinker.

It was again the wounding truth; and Courtnay sprang up and dashed for
him. Tinker bolted round a group of shrubs, Courtnay after him.
Finding him unpleasantly quick on his feet Tinker bolted into the
shrubs. Courtnay plunged after him right into a well-grown specimen of
the flowering cactus. It brought him up short. He began to swear, and
though he could have sworn with equal fluency and infelicity in French,
German, or Italian, in the depth of his genuine emotion he returned to
the tongue of his boyhood, and swore in English. When he came out of
the shrubs, adorned on one side of his face and both hands with neat
little beads of blood, he found that Claire had risen from her seat,
and was looking shocked, surprised, and worst of all, disgusted. He
did not mend matters much by mixing his apologies with threats of
vengeance on Tinker; but his temper, once out of control, was not
easily curbed. He made a most unfortunate impression on her; the beads
of blood scarcely excited her pity at all.

Meanwhile Tinker had taken advantage of his pursuer's meeting with the
cactus to leave the terrace swiftly. He went back to the Hotel des
Princes, and took out Blazer for a walk, and as he walked, his
seraph-like face glowed with the pleasantest complacency. Blazer did
not like Monte Carlo at all; for him there was no sport and little
exercise in it; Tinker liked it very much. He had made many friends in
it, and enjoyed many amusements, the chief a pleasant, perpetual war
against the heavy, liveried guardians of the gambling rooms. It was
his opinion that people came to Monte Carlo to gamble; it was the
opinion of the Societe des Bains de Mer de Monte Carlo that children
ought not to be admitted to the tables. They asserted their opinion;
and Tinker asserted his, with the result that his bolt into the Salles
de Jeu and his difficult extrication from them by the brawny, but
liveried officials was fast becoming one of the events of the day.
Sometimes Tinker would make his bolt from the outermost portal;
sometimes, with the decorous air of one going to church, he would join
the throng filing into the concert room, and bolt from the midst of it.
The process of expulsion was always conducted with the greatest
courtesy on either side; for his bolt