, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"

"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns
Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by
contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."

"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic,
"your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's
fair in Love and----'"

"Exactly. All _is_ fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the
other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall
be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss
Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful
duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"--the break before the
designation is scathingly contemptuous--"by that--distinguished nobleman
himself, and by no other."

"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend
Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his
small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions
of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:

"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What
matters is--your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or
sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged
himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals.
Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own
views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place,
should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."

His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his
heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is
clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on
his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:

"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"

"To praise where a rival was worthy of praise; to be silent where it would
be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, not because of my own greater
worth, but in spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in my
opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."

The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled to mere
pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale face, to sink
away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool
distinctne