There was a moment’s silence, followed by a sudden smashing of glass. A pair of small sinewy white hands fastened cat-like upon Francis Tredethlyn’s throat, and he and Harcourt Lowther were grappling each other in a fierce struggle. It was very long since the gentleman had been weak enough to get in a passion. He had sat as still as a statue while the Cornishman set forth his indictment, waiting to see how completely he had failed; and now that he knew that his plot, so deliberately laid, so patiently carried out, was only a bungling business after all--for the man _must_ have bungled who fails so utterly--Mr. Lowther lost his head all in a moment, and abandoned himself to a sudden access of rage, that reduced him to the level of a wounded tiger. It was scarcely with Francis that he was angry. What did it matter how this man spoke of him or thought of him? What did it matter that these other men should hear him accused of a baseness, which was only an intellectual improvement upon the vulgar process by which the gentlemanly birds of prey plucked the tender plumage of their victims? All this was nothing. It was against himself--against his own failure--that Harcourt Lowther’s fury was raging; only like all fury of that kind, it was ravenous for vengeance of some sort. It was only for about twenty seconds that his claws were fastened on Francis Tredethlyn’s throat. A Cornish heavy-weight is not exactly the kind of person for a delicately-built Sybarite to wrestle with very successfully. “We are rather celebrated for this sort of thing in my county,” Mr. Tredethlyn muttered between his set teeth, as he loosened Harcourt Lowther’s grasp from his throat, and hurled him in a kind of bundle to a corner of the room, where he fell crashing down amongst the ruins of a dumb-waiter, half buried under a chaos of broken bottles and lobster-shells. Roderick Lowther would have sprung upon his brother’s foe in the next minute, but the other men hustled round him and hemmed him in. “Don’t you see the fellow’s a Hercules?” cried one of them; “let him alone, Lowther.” “Let me go!” roared the diplomatist; “I know my brother’s a false-hearted rascal, but I won’t stand by and see a Lowther played at ball with by any boor in Christendom. Let me get at him, Boystock, or I shall hurt you.” But Francis had walked quietly to the door, and turning with his hand upon the lock, waited for a moment’s pause in the confusion before he spoke. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you are witnesses that your friend attacked me. I have no quarrel with Mr. Roderick Lowther; and as I am the bigger man of the two, there would be no credit for either him or me in a scuffle between us. If Harcourt Lowther wants to see me, he will be able to find me any time this week at the Grand Hotel, Covent Garden; after this week I shall sail for South America by the first packet that leaves Liverpool.”