brought
more cunning to the trade than did our simple Simon himself. If her
friend Montaiglon had not come here to look for you, and thereby put us
on an old trail we had abandoned, we would never have guessed the source
of her information."

"I'll be cursed if I have a dog's luck!" cried Simon.

Argyll looked pityingly at him. "So!" said he. "You mind our old country
saying, _Ni droch dhuine dan da fein_--a bad man makes his own fate?"

"Do you say so?" cried MacTaggart, with his first sign of actual
insolence, and the Duke sighed.

"My good Simon," said he, "I do not require to tell you so, for you know
it very well. What I would add is that all I have said is, so far as
I am concerned, between ourselves; that's my only tribute to our old
acquaintanceship. Only I can afford to have no more night escapades at
Doom or anywhere else with my fencibles, and so, Simon, the resignation
cannot be a day too soon."

"Heaven forbid that I should delay it a second longer than is desirable,
and your Grace has it here and now! A fine _fracas_ all this about a
puddock-eating Frenchman! I do not value him nor his race to the extent
of a pin. And as for your Grace's Chamberlain--well, Simon MacTaggart
has done very well hitherto on his own works and merits."

"You may find, for all that," says his Grace, "that they were all summed
up in a few words--'he was a far-out cousin to the Duke.' _Sic itur ad
astra_."

At that Simon put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant
stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of
his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as he descended.

"The man is fey," said the Duke to himself, listening with a startled
gravity.

CHAPTER XLI -- CONCLUSION

Simon MacTaggart went out possessed by the devils of hatred and chagrin.
He saw himself plainly for what he was in truth--a pricked bladder, his
career come to an ignoble conclusion, the single honest scheme he had
ever set his heart on brought to nought, and his vanity already wounded
sorely at the prospect of a contemptuous world to be faced for the
remainder of his days. All this from the romantics of a Frenchman who
walked through life in the step of a polonaise, and a short season ago
was utterly unaware that such a man as Simon MacTaggart existed, or
that a woman named Olivia bloomed, a very flower, among the wilds!
At whatever angle he viewed the congregated disasters of the past few
weeks, he saw Co