‘My dear Tom,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy interposed nervously, ‘what on earth are you doing? Young Noel will certainly overhear you. Upon my word, though I can’t say I agree with all the young fellow’s English sentiments, I really don’t see that there’s anything in particular to laugh at in him. He seems to me a very gentlemanly, well-bred, intelligent—— Why, goodness gracious, Tom, what has come over you so suddenly? You look for all the world as if you were positively going to kill yourself outright with laughing about nothing!’ Mr Tom Dupuy removed his handkerchief hastily from his mouth, and with an immense effort to restrain his merriment, exclaimed in a low suppressed voice: ‘Why, now, Uncle Theodore, do you mean to tell me you don’t see the whole joke! you don’t understand the full absurdity of the situation?’ Mr Dupuy gazed back at him blankly. ‘No more than I understand why on earth you are making such a confounded fool of yourself now,’ he answered contemptuously. Tom Dupuy calmed himself slowly with a terrific effort, and blurted out at last, in a mysterious undertone: ‘Why, the point of it is, don’t you see, Uncle Theodore, the fellow’s a coloured man himself, as sure as ever you and I are standing here this minute!’ A light burst in upon Mr Dupuy’s benighted understanding with extraordinary rapidity. ‘He is!’ he cried, clapping his hand to his forehead hurriedly in the intense excitement of a profoundly important discovery. ‘He is, he is! There can’t be a doubt about it! Baronet or no baronet, as sure as fate, Tom, my boy, that man’s a regular brown man!’ ‘I knew he was,’ Tom Dupuy replied exultantly, ‘the very moment I first set eyes upon that ugly head of his! I was sure he was a nigger as soon as I looked at him! I suspected it at once from his eyes and his knuckles. But when he told me his mother was a Barbadian woman—why, then, I knew, as sure as fate, it was all up with him.’ ‘You’re quite right, quite right, Tom; I haven’t a doubt about it,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy continued helplessly, wringing his hands before him in bewilderment and horror. ‘And the worst of it is I have asked him to stop here as long as he’s in Trinidad! What a terrible thing if it were to get about over the whole island that I’ve asked a brown man to come and stop for an indefinite period under the same roof with your cousin Nora!’ Tom Dupuy was not wanting in chivalrous magnanimity. He leaned back on the sofa and screwed his mouth up for a moment with a comical expression; then he answered slowly: ‘It’s a very serious thing, of course, to accuse a man offhand of being a nigger. We mustn’t condemn him unheard or without evidence. We must try to find out all we can about his family. Luckily, he’s given us the clue himself. He said his mother was a Barbadian woman—a Budleigh of the Wilderness. We’ll track him down. I’ve made a mental note of it!’