e
far from brilliant lamps. Mount Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth
for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old
Doby's Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and began
to tramp up and down--out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of
the shadows into the poor light.

"You know," he said, "what I think about most things--you know what I
feel."

"I think I do."

"You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves as half men
and marked merchandise by selling themselves and their houses and their
blood to foreign women who can buy them. You know how savage I have been
at the mere thought of it. And how I have sworn----"

"Yes, I know what you have sworn," said Mr. Penzance.

It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his head rather like a
bull about to charge an enemy.

"You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when I
blackguarded such men and sneered at such women--taking it for granted
that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath contempt. I am
not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross words and rough ones to
describe them."

"I have heard you."

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh laugh. He came out
of the shadow and stood still.

"Well," he said, "I am in love--as much in love as any lunatic ever
was--with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. There you are--and there
_I_ am!"

"It has seemed to me," Penzance answered, "that it was almost
inevitable."

"My condition is such that it seems to ME that it would be inevitable in
the case of any man. When I see another man look at her my blood races
through my veins with an awful fear and a wicked heat. That will show
you the point I have reached." He walked over to the mantelpiece and
laid his pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady. "In turning
over the pages of the volume of Life," he said, "I have come upon the
Book of Revelations."

"That is true," Penzance said.

"Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount Dunstan went
on. "And afterwards one is--for a time at least--a sort of madman raving
to one's self, either in or out of a straitjacket--as the case may be. I
am wearing the jacket--worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of
a man who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without being
conscious that he is making mad love to her? This afternoon I found
myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the s