“I thought so! That would have been his moment! He wanted to see how I took it, damn him! Coming to the church was his idea. He may have persuaded her that it was a good ruse, a clever trick. But really he wanted to see me—in the dirt. Monkey Valdez all over!” I believe that I positively shivered at the bitterness of his anger and hatred. They had been chums, pals, bosom friends. And I loved—I had loved—them both. Sir Paget, too, had made almost a son of Arsenio Valdez. “And for that—he shall pay,” said Waldo, rising to his feet. “Doesn’t he deserve to pay for that, Father?” “What do you propose to do, Waldo?” “Catch him and—give him his deserts.” “He’ll have left the country before you can catch him.” “I can follow him. And I shall. I can find him, never fear!” “You must think of her,” I ventured to suggest. “Afterwards. As much as you like—afterwards.” “But by the time you find them, they’ll have—I mean, they’ll be——” “Hold your tongue, for God’s sake, Julius!” I turned to Sir Paget. “If he insists on going, let me go with him, sir,” I said. “Yes, that would be—wise,” he assented, but, as I thought, rather absently. Waldo gave a laugh. “All right, Julius. If you fancy the job, come along and pick up the pieces! There’ll be one of us to bury, at all events.” I suppose that I made some instinctive gesture of protest, for he added: “She was mine—mine.” Sir Paget looked from him to me, and back again from me to him. “You must neither of you leave the country,” he said. CHAPTER III A HIGH EXPLOSIVE I HAVE said so much about Waldo’s “rages” that I may have given quite a wrong impression of him. The “rages” were abnormal, rare and (if one may not use the word unnatural about a thing that certainly was in his nature) at least paradoxical. The normal—the all but invariable and the ultimately ruling—Waldo was a placid, good-tempered fellow; not very energetic mentally, yet very far from a fool; a moderate Conservative, a good sportsman, an ardent Territorial officer, and a crack rifle-shot. He had an independent fortune from his mother, and his “Occupation” would, I suppose, have to be entered on the Government forms as “None” or “Gentleman”; all the same, he led a full, active, and not altogether useless existence. Quite a type of his class, in fact, except for those sporadic rages, which came, I think, in the end from an extreme, an exaggerated, sense of justice. He would do no wrong, but neither would he suffer any; it seemed to him an outrage that any one should trench on his rights: among his rights he included fair, honorable and courteous treatment—and a very high standard of it. He asked what he gave. It seems odd that a delicacy of sensitiveness should result, even now and then, in a mad-bull rage, but it is not, when one thinks it over, unintelligible.