I looked him in the face, and I think my eyes told him pretty plainly my views of the meaning of the note. He answered my glance at first with a carefully inexpressive gaze; but presently a meaning came into his eyes. He seemed to confess to me and to challenge me to make what use I could of the confession. But the next instant the momentary candour of his regard passed, and blankness spread over his face again. Desperately I struggled with myself, clinging to self-control. To this day I believe that, had my life and my life only been in question, I should then and there have compelled Mouraki to fight me, man to man, in the little gloomy room where the dead woman lay on the sofa. We should not have disturbed her; and I think also that Mouraki, who did not want for courage, would have caught at my challenge and cried content to a proposal that we should, there and then, put our quarrel to an issue, and that one only of us should go alive down the hill. I read such a mood in his eyes in the moment of their candour. I saw the courage to act on it in his resolute lips and his tense still attitude. Well, we could neither of us afford the luxury. If I killed him, I should bring grave suspicion on Phroso. She and her islanders would be held accomplices; and, though this was a secondary matter to hot rage, I myself should stand in a position of great danger. And he could not kill me; for all his schemes against me were still controlled and limited by the necessities of his position. Had I been an islander, or even an unknown man concerning whom no questions would be asked, his work would have been simple, and, as I believed, would have been carried out before now. But it was not so. He would be held responsible for a satisfactory account of how I met my death. It would tax his invention to give it if he killed me himself, with his own hand, and in a secret encounter. In fact, the finding of the note left us where we were, so far as action was concerned, but it tore away the last shreds of the veil, the last pretences of good faith and friendliness which had been kept up between us. In that swift, full, open glance which we had exchanged, our undisguised quarrel, the great issue between us, was legibly written and plainly read. Yet not a word passed our lips concerning it. Mouraki and I began to need words no more than lovers do. For hate matches love in penetration. I put the note in my pocket. Mouraki blinked eyes now utterly free from expression. I gave a final glance at the dead woman. I felt a touch of shame at having for a moment forgotten her fate for my quarrel. ‘Shall we go down, Pasha?’ said I. ‘As soon as you please, Lord Wheatley,’ he answered. This formal mode of address was perhaps an acknowledgment that the time for hypocrisy and the hollow show of friendship between us was over. The change was just in his way, slight, subtle, but sufficient.