‘Pardon me,’ Harry answered carelessly, with his wine-glass poised for a moment half lifted in his hand. ‘I admit most unreservedly that you know a great deal more than I do about the differential duties, whatever they may be, for I never so much as heard their very name in all my life until the present moment.’ Tom Dupuy smiled a satisfied smile of complete triumph. ‘I thought as much,’ he said exultantly; ‘I knew you hadn’t. That’s just the way of all English people. They know nothing at all about the most important and essential matters, and yet they venture to talk about them for all the world as if they knew as much as we do about the whole subject.’ ‘Really,’ Harry answered with a good-humoured smile, ‘I fancied a man might be fairly well informed about things in general, and yet never have heard in his pristine innocence of the differential duties. I haven’t the very faintest idea myself, to tell you the truth, what they are. Perhaps you will be good enough to lighten my darkness.’ ‘What they are!’ Tom Dupuy ejaculated in pious horror. ‘They aren’t anything. They’re done away with. They’ve ceased to exist long ago. You and the other plaguy English people took them off, and ruined the colonies; and now you don’t as much as know what you’ve done, or whether they’re existing still or done away with!’ ‘Tom, my boy,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy interposed blandly, ‘you really mustn’t hold Mr Noel personally responsible for all the undoubted shortcomings of the English nation! You must remember that his father is, like ourselves, a West Indian proprietor, and that the iniquitous proceedings with reference to the differential duties—which nobody can for a moment pretend to justify—injured him every bit as much as they injured ourselves.’ ‘But what _are_ the differential duties?’ Harry whispered to his next neighbour but one, the Scotch doctor. ‘I never heard of them in my life, I assure you, till this very minute.’ ‘Well, you know,’ Dr Macfarlane responded slowly, ‘there was a time when sugar from the British colonies was admitted into Britain at a less duty than sugar from Cuba or other foreign possessions; and at last, the British consumer took the tax off the foreign sugar, and cheapened them all alike in the British market. Very good, of course, for the British consumer, but clean ruination and nothing else for the Trinidad planter.’ For the moment, the conversation changed, but not the smouldering war between the two belligerents. Whatever subject Harry Noel happened to start during that unlucky dinner, Tom Dupuy, watching him closely, pounced down upon him at once like an owl on the hover, and tore him to pieces with prompt activity. Harry bore it all as good-naturedly as he could, though his temper was by no means naturally a forbearing one; but he didn’t wish to come to an open rupture with Tom Dupuy at his uncle’s table, especially after that morning’s occurrences.