compunction or remorse rose in his mind as he looked down at the
handsome flushed face--quite calm and set outwardly in spite of the
terrible agony raging within heart and mind.

"Lambert!" he said gruffly, "listen to me.... Your conduct hath been
most unseemly.... Mistress Endicott has for my sake, already shown you
much kindness and forbearance ... Had she acted as she had the right to
do, she would have had you kicked out of the house by her servants....
In your own interests now I should advise you to follow me quietly out
of the house...."

But this suggestion raised a hot protest on the part of all the
spectators.

"He shall not go!" declared Segrave violently.

"Not without leaving behind him what he has deliberately stolen,"
commented Endicott, raising his oily voice above the din.

Lambert had waited patiently, whilst his employer spoke. The last
remnant of that original sense of deference and of gratitude caused him
to hold himself in check lest he should strike that treacherous coward
in the face. Sir Marmaduke's callousness in the face of his peril and
unmerited disgrace, had struck Lambert with an overwhelming feeling of
disappointment and loneliness. But his cruel insults now quashed despair
and roused dormant indignation to fever pitch. One look at Sir
Marmaduke's sneering face had told him not only that he could expect no
help from the man who--by all the laws of honor--should have stood by
him in his helplessness, but that he was the fount and source, the
instigator of the terrible wrong and injustice which was about to land
an innocent man in the veriest abyss of humiliation and irretrievable
disgrace.

"And so this was your doing, Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse," he said,
looking his triumphant enemy boldly in the face, even whilst compelling
silent attention from those who were heaping opprobrious epithets upon
him. "You enticed me here.... You persuaded me to play, ... Then you
tried to rob me of mine honor, of my good name, the only valuable assets
which I possess.... Hell and all its devils alone know why you did this
thing, but I swear before God that your hideous crime shall not remain
unpunished...."

"Silence!" commanded Sir Marmaduke, who was the first to perceive the
strange, almost supernatural, effect produced on all those present, by
the young man's earnestness, his impressive calm. Segrave himself stood
silent and abashed, whilst everyone listened, unconsciously awed by that
unmist