nked by amateurs like
yourself. It's too ridiculous!"

The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun
to spread through Plowden's consciousness. It was almost more surprising
to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed
himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept
back into his glance. He breathed more easily.

"You are right!" he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of
fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute's pride in his
own brains and power was still his weakest point. "You are right! I did
play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first
man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at
the very outset, 'You are going to go far. You are going to be a great
man.' You remember that, don't you?"

Thorpe nodded. "Yes--I remember it."

The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket,
and extracted a match. "Do you mind?" he asked, and scarcely waiting for
a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied
it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men
watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate,
without a word.

This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of
the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it
became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and
put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.

"It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me," he said, in
an altered, harsh tone, "but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum
of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and
he's a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what
one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and
spend your money,--money I gave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender
over here. You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him
against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for
a still bigger profit. You see it's all at my fingers' ends."

Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.

"Well then--Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to
meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the
smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom
of wits about me, and strain