"Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have stopped barking. She said below her breath: "Vexed? ... Why, you’re really! ... And Lady Beau wasn’t joking about your brother.... She wouldn’t dream of such a thing! .... She’s tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he—your brother—nice? ..." "Most women thought so." "Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted. Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering: "You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red." The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the masculine baritone: "I like—red men—best!" "So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe’s quick ear caught the final words. She shrilled out her laugh: "But you’re a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!" "Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of Christianity—particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then I am a god!" "A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you’ve got to die, you know, when your number’s up." "When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then we shall die no more."