“My God!” he growled. “Are you led by your vices like a blind man by his dog?” The Duke stepped back before the sudden menace of that tone and mien. At once he wrapt himself in a mantle of arrogance. “I warned you, sir, that I will suffer no heroics; that I will have no man play Bobadil to me. You asked service of me. I have shown you how I can employ you.” “Service?” echoed Holles, his voice almost choked with anger. “Is this service for a gentleman?” “Perhaps not. But a man standing in the shadow of the gallows should not be over-fastidious.” The flush perished in the Colonel’s face; the haunting fear returned to his eyes. The Duke, seeing him thus suddenly stricken by that grim reminder, was moved to sudden laughter. “It seems you have to realize, Colonel Holles, that there is no music without frets. You resent that I should ask a trifling service of you when in return I am offering to make your fortune. For that is what I am offering. You come as opportunely to my need as to your own. Serve me as I require, and I pledge you my word that I shall not neglect you.” “But this ... this....” faltered Holles, protesting. “It is a task for bullies, for jackals.” The Duke shrugged. “Damme! Why trouble to define it?” Then he changed his tone again. “The choice is yours. Fortune makes the offer: gold on the one hand; hemp on the other. I do not press either upon you.” Holles was torn between fear and honour. In imagination he felt already the rope about his neck; he beheld that wasted life of his finding a fitting consummation on Tyburn at the hands of Derrick. Thus fear impelled him to accept. But the old early notions that had inspired his ambition and had made him strive to keep his honour clean rose up to hold him back. His tortured thoughts evoked an image of Nancy Sylvester, as he had last seen her set in the frame of her casement, and he conceived the shame and horror in that face could she behold him engaged upon so loathly an enterprise--he who had gone forth so proudly to conquer the world for her. Many a time in the past had that image delivered him from the evil to which he was tempted. “I’ll go my ways, I think,” he said heavily, and half turned as if to depart. “You know whither it leads?” came the Duke’s warning voice. “I care not an apple-paring.” “As you please.” In silence Holles bowed, and made his way to the door with dragging feet, hope’s last bubble pricked. And then the Duke’s voice arrested him again. “Holles, you are a fool.” “I have long known it. I was a fool when I saved your life, and you pay me as a fool should be paid.” “You pay yourself. And of your own choice you do so in fool’s coin.”