ked
of me." He was very white, yet by an effort those deep blue eyes of his
met the terrible gaze of his chief without flinching.

"Perhaps you'll explain," said his lordship coldly.

"In the first place," said O'Moy, "it was myself killed Samoval, and
since your lordship was a witness of what followed, you will realise
that that was the least part of my offence."

The great soldier jerked his head sharply backward, tilting forward
his chin. "So!" he said. "Ha! I beg your pardon, Grant, for having
disbelieved you." Then, turning to O'Moy again: "Well," he demanded, his
voice hard, "have you nothing to add?"

"Nothing that can matter," said O'Moy, with a shrug, and they stood
facing each other in silence for a long moment.

At last when Wellington spoke his voice had assumed a gentler note.

"O'Moy," he said, "I have known you these fifteen years, and we have
been friends. Once you carried your friendship, appreciation, and
understanding of me so far as nearly to ruin yourself on my behalf.
You'll not have forgotten the affair of Sir Harry Burrard. In all these
years I have known you for a man of shining honour, an honest, upright
gentleman, whom I would have trusted when I should have distrusted every
other living man. Yet you stand there and confess to me the basest,
the most dishonest villainy that I have ever known a British officer to
commit, and you tell me that you have no explanation to offer for your
conduct. Either I have never known you, O'Moy, or I do not know you now.
Which is it?"

O'Moy raised his arms, only to let them fall heavily to his sides again.

"What explanation can there be?" he asked. "How can a man who has
been--as I hope I have--a man of honour in the past explain such an act
of madness? It arose out of your order against duelling," he went on.
"Samoval offended me mortally. He said such things to me of my wife's
honour that no man could suffer, and I least of any man. My temper
betrayed me. I consented to a clandestine meeting without seconds. It
took place here, and I killed him. And then I had, as I imagined--quite
wrongly, as I know now--overwhelming evidence that what he had told
me was true, and I went mad." Briefly he told the story of Tremayne's
descent from Lady O'Moy's balcony and the rest.

"I scarcely know," he resumed, "what it was I hoped to accomplish in the
end. I do not know--for I never stopped to consider--whether I should
have allowed Captain Tremayne to have been