"The farce," I replied hotly, "is one of those which are best played seriously. Remember that, Count Lukstein!" "Well, well," he said indulgently, "have your own way. But, believe me, you are making a mistake. I have no wish to cheapen your wares. That you have picked up some fragments of the truth I am ready to agree; and I am equally ready to buy your silence. You have but to name your price." "I have named it," I muttered, locking my teeth, for I was fast losing my temper, and feared lest I might raise my voice sufficiently to be heard beyond the room. "Let me prove to you that you are wasting time," said he with insolent patience. "You have been ill-primed for your work. You say that you visited Sir Julian on the night of the 22nd. You say that you were Sir Julian's friend. I would not hurt your feelings, Mr. Buckler, but both those statements are, to put it coarsely, lies. You were never Sir Julian's friend, or you would have known better than to have fixed that date. But two people visited him on the 22nd, a priest and a woman, the most edifying company possible for a dying man." He ended with a smooth scorn. I looked up at him and laughed. "Ah!" said he, "we are beginning to understand each other." I laughed a second time. "She was over-tall for a woman, my lord," said I, "though of no great stature for a man." I rose as I spoke the words and confronted him. We were standing on opposite sides of the little table. The smile died off his face; he leaned his hands upon the table and bent slowly over it, searching my looks with horror-stricken eyes. "What do you mean?" he asked in a hoarse whisper. "I was the woman. How else should I have got that box?" "You, you!" He spoke in a queer matter-of-fact tone of assent. All his feeling and passion seemed to have gathered in his eyes. So we stood waging a battle of looks. And then of a sudden I noticed a crafty, indefinable change in his expression, and from the tail of my eye I saw his fingers working stealthily across the table. I dropped my hand on to the butt of my pistol. With a ready cunning he picked up the gold box and began to examine it with so natural an air of abstraction that I almost wondered whether I had not mistaken his design. "And so," says he at length, "you would fight with me?" "If it please you, yes," says I. "Miss Marston, it seems, has more admirers than I knew of," he returned, with a cunning leer which made my stomach rise at him. He seemed incapable of conceiving a plain open purpose in any man. Yet for all that I could not but admire the nimbleness of his wits. Not merely had he recovered his easy demeanour, but he was already, as I could see, working out another issue from the impasse. I clung fast to the facts. "I have never seen Miss Marston," said I. "I fight for my friend."