As soon as the ladies had left the room, however, Tom Dupuy drew up his chair so as exactly to face Harry, and began to pour out for himself in quick succession glass after glass of his uncle’s fiery sherry, which he tossed off with noisy hilarity. The more he drank, the louder his voice became, and the hotter his pursuit of Harry Noel. At last, when Mr Theodore Dupuy, now really alarmed as to what his nephew was going to say next, ordered in the coffee prematurely, to prevent an open outbreak by rejoining the ladies, Tom walked deliberately over to the sideboard and took out a large square decanter, from which he poured a good-sized liqueur-glassful of some pale liquid for himself and another for Harry. ‘There!’ he cried boisterously. ‘Just you try that, Noel, will you. There’s liquor for you! That’s the real old Pimento Valley rum, the best in the island, double distilled, and thirty years in bottle. You don’t taste any _hogo_ about that, Mr Englishman, eh, do you?’ ‘Any what?’ Harry inquired politely, lifting up the glass and sipping a little of the contents out of pure courtesy, for neat rum is not in itself a very enticing beverage to any other than West Indian palates. ‘Any _hogo_,’ Tom Dupuy repeated loudly and insolently—‘_hogo, hogo_. I suppose, now, you mean to say you don’t even know what _hogo_ is, do you?—Never heard of _hogo_? Precious affectation! Don’t understand plain language! Yah, rubbish! ‘Why, no, certainly,’ Harry assented as calmly as he was able; ‘I never before did hear of _hogo_, I assure you. I haven’t the slightest idea what it is, or whether I ought rather to admire or to deplore its supposed absence in this very excellent old rum of yours.’ ‘_Hogo_’s French,’ Tom Dupuy asserted doggedly, ‘_Hogo_’s French, and I should have thought you ought to have known it. Everybody in Trinidad knows what _hogo_ is. It’s French, I tell you. Didn’t you ever learn any French at the school you went to, Noel?’ ‘Excuse me,’ Harry said, flushing up a little, for Tom Dupuy had asked the question very offensively. ‘It is _not_ French. I know enough of French at least to say that such a word as _hogo_, whatever it may mean, couldn’t possibly be French for anything.’ ‘As my nephew pronounces it,’ Mr Dupuy put in diplomatically, ‘you may perhaps have some difficulty in recognising its meaning; but it’s our common West Indian corruption, Mr Noel, of _haut goût_—_haut goût_, you understand me—precisely so; _haut goût_, or _hogo_, being the strong and somewhat offensive molasses-like flavour of new rum, before it has been mellowed, as this of ours has been, by being kept for years in the wood and in bottle.’