for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"

"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There
is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there
is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid
in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the
lamp by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I
ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our
little argument?"

"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."

The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing, listened
instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth voice and
with a rather bewildering smile.

"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman has
ever succeeded in doing before."

"Indeed!"

"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."

"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.

"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe it
out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way
by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am going,
at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you that
you were wrong in what you said."

"In what I said?"

"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."

"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you
said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to
a neglected truth."

Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.

"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think me
a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."

Syme struck his stick violently on th