orsooth," replied Sir Marmaduke lightly, "and you played to some
purpose, meseems, when you once began.... Nay! I pray you," he added
with unmitigated harshness, "do not drag me into your quarrels.... I
cannot of a truth champion your virtue."

Lambert's cheeks became deathly pale. The first inkling of the deadly
peril of his own situation had suddenly come to him with Sir Marmaduke's
callous words. It seemed to him as if the very universe must stand still
in the face of such treachery. The man whom he loved with all the fervor
of a grateful nature, the man who knew him and whom he had wholly
trusted, was proving his most bitter, most damning enemy.

After Sir Marmaduke's speech, his own employer's repudiation, he felt
that all his chances of clearing his character before these sneering
gentlemen had suddenly vanished.

"This is cruel, and infamous," he protested, conscious innocence within
him still striving to fight a hard battle against overwhelming odds.
"Gentlemen! ... as I am a man of honor, I swear that I do not know what
all this means!"

"It means, young man, that you are an accursed cheat ... a thief ... a
liar!" shouted Segrave, whose last vestige of self-control suddenly
vanished, whilst mad frenzy once more held him in its grip. "I swear by
God that you shall pay me for this!"

He threw himself with all the strength of a raving maniac upon Lambert,
who for the moment was taken unawares, and yielded to the suddenness of
the onslaught. But it was indeed a conflict 'twixt town and country,
the simple life against nightly dissipations, the forests and cliffs of
Thanet against the enervating atmosphere of the city.

After that first onrush, Lambert, with marvelous agility and quick
knowledge of a hand-to-hand fight, had shaken himself free of his
opponent's trembling grasp. It was his turn now to have the upper hand,
and in a trice he had, with a vigorous clutch, gripped his opponent by
the throat.

In a sense, his calmness had not forsaken him, his mind was as quiet, as
clear as heretofore; it was only his muscle--his bodily energy in the
face of a violent and undeserved attack--which had ceased to be under
his control.

"Man! man!" he murmured, gazing steadily into the eyes of his
antagonist, "ye shall swallow those words--or by Heaven I will kill
you!"

The tumult which ensued drowned everything save itself ... everything,
even the sound of that slow and measured tramp, tramp, tramp, which was
waf