At the dinner that evening, Macfarlane, the Scotch doctor, took in Nora; while Harry Noel had handed over to his care a dowager-planteress from a neighbouring estate; so Harry had no need to talk any further to his pretty little hostess during that memorable Tuesday. On Wednesday morning he had made up his mind he would find some excuse to get away from this awkward position in Mr Dupuy’s household; for it was clearly impossible for him to remain there any longer, after he had again asked Nora and been rejected; but of course he couldn’t go so suddenly before the dinner to be given in his honour; and he waited on, impatiently and sullenly. Tom Dupuy was there too; and even Mr Theodore Dupuy himself, who knew the whole secret of Harry’s black blood, and therefore regarded him now as almost beyond the pale of human sympathy, couldn’t help noticing to himself that his nephew Tom really seemed quite unnecessarily anxious to drag this unfortunate young man Noel into some sort of open rupture. ‘Very ill advised of Tom,’ Mr Dupuy thought to himself; ‘and very bad manners too, for a Dupuy of Trinidad. He ought to know well enough that whatever the young man’s undesirable antecedents may happen to be, as long as he’s here in the position of a guest, he ought at least to be treated with common decency and common politeness. To-morrow, we shall manage to hunt up some excuse, or give him some effectual hint, which will have the result of clearing him bodily off the premises. Till then, Tom ought to endeavour to treat him, as far as possible, in every way like a perfect equal.’ Even during the time while the ladies still remained in the dining-room, Tom Dupuy couldn’t avoid making several severe hits, as he considered them, at Harry Noel from the opposite side of the hospitable table. Harry had happened once to venture on some fairly sympathetic commonplace remark to his dowager-planteress about the planters having been quite ruined by emancipation, when Tom Dupuy fell upon him bodily, and called out with an unconcealed sneer: ‘Ruined by emancipation!—ruined by emancipation! That just shows how much you know about the matter, to talk of the planters being ruined by emancipation! If you knew anything at all of what you’re talking about, you’d know that it wasn’t emancipation in the least that ruined us, but your plaguy parliament doing away with the differential duties.’ Harry bit his lip, and glanced across the table at the young planter with a quiet smile of superiority; but the only word he permitted himself to utter was the one harmless and neutral word ‘Indeed!’ ‘O yes, you may say “Indeed” if you like,’ Tom Dupuy retorted warmly. ‘That’s just the way of all you conceited English people. You think you know such a precious lot about the whole subject, and you really and truly know in the end just less than absolutely nothing.’