“You are not,” said Mr. Dunn with a dignity which would have surprised his mother. “Any man who sneers as you are sneering at the moment, Lord Vest, must be in the wrong about everything. You cannot be in the right, sir, with a poisonous voice like that. I am Lady Vest’s very humble admirer and, I hope, friend----” “Friendship, Mr. Dunn, can wear strange shapes. Friendship, my dear Mr. Dunn, can be the outward label of infidelity. Am I right, Pamela?” “Mr. Dunn,” said Lady Vest with flushed cheeks, “you will be doing me a very great favour by overlooking my husband’s behaviour this evening. Justinian,” she turned to her husband with a high look, “I knew I was married to a megalomaniac. But I did not realise I was married to a madman. I insist on retiring now; and would advise Mr. Dunn to do the same.” “And I,” shouted Lord Vest, “insist on your staying where you are; and would advise Mr. Dunn to do the same. Do you understand? And you, my good young man?” Mr. Dunn could not help but pretend to understand, while awaiting developments. He was dismayed by the violence of dislike on the nobleman’s colonial face as he turned it to his wife, the gentle lady, a picture of outraged innocence, of appalled decorum, her great blue eyes swept with astonished distaste, her sweet sad face white with sudden fear. For my Lord Vest was not smiling now. Mr. Dunn revealed at the enquiry which later sat on these affairs that it was at that moment he first realised that his lordship was mad. But his madness, said Mr. Dunn, wore so sane, so coherent a habit, that a chap couldn’t but mistrust his fleeting, if well-grounded, suspicion; and even in the very second of his dashing frantically past Lord Vest to the door, which the second butler, being conveniently situated nearby in a curved position, held closed for him on the outside while he made his escape from the house, you couldn’t be certain, said Mr. Dunn, whether the nobleman’s roar of baffled rage was not more than that of one cheated of the entertainment of a repulsive jest than that of a chap mortified to the point of lunacy. For his employer, said Mr. Dunn warmly, was ever a gentleman with a partiality for making jests of a kind which, Mr. Dunn indignantly supposed, might be considered laughter-provoking on the Australian veldt, bush, or prairie, but were certainly not the thing in England. The plain truth of the matter is, as you can see when shorn of Mr. Dunn’s naïve observations, that Mr. Dunn turned tail and fled. In the graphic words of Lord Tarlyon, who was among the Commission of Peers who sat to enquire into the Vest affair, Mr. Dunn, awaiting his opportunity with an eagerness worthy of a braver purpose, jumped up from his chair like a scalded cat and, muttering something about a dog, ran out of that house like a bat out of hell. IV