n. But either he thought better of it or his rage choked
him. With a final tap on the crown of his hat, to settle it firmly on
his brows, he strode past the rigid figure by the threshold and out
into the open air.

He had never been so outraged! For fifty or a hundred yards, as he
descended the hill, his fury almost blinded him. His face was
congested; the back of his neck swollen and purple, as though apoplexy
threatened. His ears showed red as a turkey's wattles. He stumbled on
the ill-paved path. What! To be lectured thus by a man whose continued
residence on the Islands was a public scandal--a fellow who, past all
usefulness, lived on in lazy desuetude, content to take the taxpayers'
money while doing nothing in return! And the worst--the gall, the
wormwood of it--was that this despised foe had silenced him--nay, had
silenced him almost contemptuously. "But wait a bit, my fine fellow!"
swore the Lord Proprietor, blundering down the hill. "Wait until we
hear what the War Office has to say about your precious garrison; or
until, failing satisfaction there, I get a question asked in Parliament
about you!"

Could the Lord Proprietor have looked back at this moment into the room
where sat the victorious enemy, he might have been in some measure
consoled.

The Commandant, having dismissed Archelaus with a wave of the hand,
waited while the door closed, and dropping into the chair before his
writing-table, bowed his head upon his hands.... Oh, it is easy to talk
lightly of riches, and of the power that riches give! But in this world
it is not so easy for a man with just one penny in his pocket to stand
up against an enemy solidly backed by a banking account. He feels that
though his cause be right and his conscience clear, his position is
precarious: that the world, if it knew the truth, would regard him
almost as an imposter. The feeling may be unreasonable, the fear
cowardly; but there it is, and it had cost the Commandant all his pluck
to face the encounter out. Moreover, his conscience was not clear.

Sir Caesar, too, had (all unwittingly) planted an arrow and left it to
rankle. "Old enough to be her father!" The Commandant shut his lips
hard upon the pain. He could not expel it: he knew it would awake again
in the watches of the night: but for the present he must ignore it. He
had a second ordeal to face.

As he sat there for a minute or two, his face resting on his hands, his
spirit abandoned to weakness, he he