‘Oh, ah, that’s all very well! I suppose _you_’re going to turn against me now, Uncle Theodore,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed angrily—he was reaching the incipient stage of quarrelsome drunkenness. ‘I suppose _you_ must go and make fun of me, too, for my French pronunciation as well as this fine-spoken Mr Noel here. But I don’t care a pin about it, or about either of you, either. Who’s Mr Noel, I should like to know, that he should come here, with his fine new-fangled English ways, setting himself up to be better than we are, and teaching us to improve our French pronunciation?—O yes, it’s all very fine; but what does he want to go stopping in our houses for, with our own ladies, and all that, and then going and visiting with coloured rubbish that I wouldn’t touch with a pair of tongs—the woolly-headed niggers!—that’s what I want to know, Uncle Theodore?’ Mr Dupuy and Harry rose together. ‘Tom, Tom!’ Mr Dupuy cried warningly, ‘you are quite forgetting yourself. Remember that this gentleman is my guest, and is here to-day by my invitation. How dare you say such things as that to my own guest, sir, at my own table? You insult me, sir, you insult me!’ ‘I think,’ Harry interrupted, white with anger, ‘I had better withdraw at once, Mr Dupuy, before things go any further, from a room where I am evidently, quite without any intention on my own part, a cause of turmoil and disagreement.’ He moved hastily towards the open window which gave upon the lawn, where the ladies were strolling, after the fashion of the country, in the silvery moonlight, among the tropical shrubbery. But Tom Dupuy jumped up before him and stood in his way, now drunk with wine and rum and insolence and temper, and blocked his road to the open window. ‘No, no!’ he cried, ‘you shan’t go yet!—I’ll tell you all the reason why, gentlemen. He shall hear the truth. I’ll take the vanity and nonsense out of him! He’s a brown man himself, nothing but a brown man!—Do you know, you fine fellow you, that you’re only, after all, a confounded woolly-headed brown mulatto? You are, sir! you are, I tell you! Look at your hands, you nigger, look at your hands, I say, if ever you doubt it.’ Harry Noel’s proud lip curled contemptuously as he pushed the half-tipsy planter aside with his elbow, and began to stride angrily away towards the moonlit shrubbery. ‘I daresay I am,’ he answered coolly, for he was always truthful, and it flashed across his mind in the space of a second that Tom Dupuy was very possibly right enough. ‘But if I am, my good fellow, I will no longer inflict my company, I tell you, upon persons who, I see, are evidently so little desirous of sharing it any further.’