You go and rob your
neighbour for a matter of about twenty years, and when I drop into his
property you go on robbing me, and then because your son's a good chap a
man is obliged to let you alone. I don't think that that is fair.'

John Jervase had seated himself at the opposite side of the cemetery
path, and was as busy in the making of hieroglyphics with the point
of his neatly folded silk umbrella as Major de Blacquaire was with the
point of his crutch.

'Hit me,' he said, 'without hitting the boy and you are welcome.'

Major de Blacquaire scored the wet gravel with the crutch, looking
frowningly down upon the ground, and Jervase scored the earth on his
side with the neat brass ferrule.

'I don't quite see what I am to do with you,' said the Major. 'It isn't
the boy's fault that he has a rotter for a father, is it?'

'Now you look here,' said John Jervase, heavily and solidly, 'I've had
pretty nearly two years to think this thing over in. I've done wrong,
and I own up to it There's my boy, Polly, as is recommended for the
Victoria Cross by Sir Colin Campbell, and fetched you out of the fire
under the Malakoff, so I'm told, as if you'd been his very born brother.
I've been sitting by his bed for more than a month past, and if I'm not
a Dutchman he hates you like poison. He'd only got to leave you there
and everything would have been at an end betwixt us; and what on earth
he fetched you out for, I don't know. If you think, Major, that I'm
appealing for myself, you're the most mistaken man in the whole wide
world. If you can find a way of hitting old Jack Jervase without hitting
the boy, find it and do it. But ever since I've heard about you, folks
have told me that you pride yourself on being a gentleman; and if a
gentleman is going to take it out of a chap who has nearly died for him,
when he had every right to leave him alone, and when it was the biggest
kind of blunder to rescue him, I'm no judge of what a gentleman ought to
be.' Major de Blacquaire moved the point of the crutch to and fro on the
moist gravel, and made his hieroglyphics in the soil without response
for a minute or two. But at last he said, in his Cambridge drawl:

'You're an illimitable old bounder, but you're rather a clever old
bounder, when all is said and done, and I suppose I shall have to let
you go.'

'Major de Blacquaire,' said Jervase, 'if ever there was a man mistaken
in this world, you're a mistaken man. I don't want your ticket,