‘Yes, yes,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed madly, planting himself once more like a fool in front of the angry and retreating Englishman, ‘he’s a brown man, a mulatto, a coloured fellow, gentlemen, own cousin of that precious nigger scamp, Isaac Pourtalès, whose woolly head I’d like to knock this minute against his own woolly head, the insolent upstart! Why, gentlemen, do you know who his mother was? Do you know who this fine Lady Noel was that he wants to come over us with? She was nothing better, I swear to you solemnly, than a common brown wench over in Barbadoes!’ Harry Noel’s face grew livid purple with that foul insult, as he leapt like a wild beast at the roaring West Indian, and with one fierce blow sent him reeling backward upon the floor at his feet like a senseless lump of dead matter. ‘Hound and cur! how dare you?’ he hissed out hoarsely, planting his foot contemptuously on the fallen planter’s crumpled shirt-front. ‘How dare you?—how dare you? Say what you will of me, myself, you miserable blackguard—but my mother! my mother!’ And then, suddenly recollecting himself, with a profound bow to the astonished company, he hurried out, hatless and hot, on to the darkling shrubbery, casting the dust of Orange Grove off his feet half instinctively behind him as he went. Next moment a soft voice sounded low beside him, to his intense astonishment. As he strode alone across the dark lawn, Nora Dupuy, who had seen the whole incident from the neighbouring shrubbery, glided out to his side from the shadow of the star-apple tree and whispered a few words earnestly in his ear. Harry Noel, still white with passion and trembling in every muscle like a hunted animal, could not but stop and listen to them eagerly even in that supreme moment of righteous indignation. ‘Thank you, Mr Noel,’ she said simply—‘thank you, thank you!’ CHAPTER XXXVI. The gentlemen in the dining-room stood looking at one another in blank dismay for a few seconds, and then Dr Macfarlane broke the breathless silence by saying out loud, with his broad Scotch bluntness: ‘Ye’re a fool, Tom Dupuy—a very fine fool, ye are; and I’m not sorry the young Englishman knocked you down and gave you a lesson, for speaking ill against his own mother.’ ‘Where has he gone?’ Dick Castello, the governor’s aide-de-camp, asked quickly, as Tom picked himself up with a sheepish, awkward, drunken look. ‘He can’t sleep here to-night now, you know, and he’ll have to sleep somewhere or other, Macfarlane, won’t he?’ ‘Run after him,’ the doctor said, ‘and take him to your own house. Not one of these precious Trinidad folk’ll stir hand or foot to befriend him anyhow, now they’ve been told he’s a brown man.’