fter that duel. I'll keep my own."

"Oh, all right," rejoined the major. "But let's be honest with
ourselves. If you could split a silver dollar nine times out of ten at
fifteen paces, would you exchange shots with a man who was beside
himself with liquor?"

"If Valiant was a dead shot, the better for him," said the doctor
grimly. "If Sassoon was drunk, so much the worse for Sassoon. His
condition was the affair of his seconds. Valiant was no more responsible
for it than for the quarrel. Neither was of his making. Just because a
man is a crack shot and stays sober, is he to bear any insult--stand up
to be shot at into the bargain--and take no hand in the game himself?
Answer me that?"

"It didn't touch his honor, of course," replied the major. "We could all
agree on that. He was within his rights. But it wasn't like a Valiant."

They were at the parting now and the major held out his hand. "Oh,
well," he said, "it's long enough ago, and there's nothing against his
son. I like the young chap, Southall. He's his father all over again,
eh?"

"When I first saw him," said the doctor huskily, "I thought I had slid
back thirty years and that our old Beauty Valiant was lying there before
me. I loved him, Bristow, and somehow--whatever happened that day at the
Hemlocks--it couldn't make a damned bit of difference to me!"

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CALL OF THE ROSES

In the great hall at Damory Court the candles in their brass
wall-sconces blinked back from the polished parquetry and the shining
fire-dogs, filling the rather solemn gloom with an air of warmth and
creature-comfort.

Leaning against the newel-post, Valiant gazed about him. How different
it all looked from the night of his coming!

It occurred to him with a kind of wonder that a fortnight ago he had
never known this house existed. Then he had conceived the old hectic
life the only one worth knowing, the be-all and end-all of modern
felicity. It was as if a single stroke had cut his life in two parts
which had instantly recoiled as far asunder as the poles. Strangely,
the new seemed more familiar than the old; there had been moments
when he remembered the past almost as in the placid day one recalls a
thriving dream of the night before, which, itself unreal, has left an
overpowering impression behind it. Little fragments of the old nightly
mosaic--the bitt-music across the dulled glisten of pounded asphalt,
the featherbone girl flaring high in air in ele