For a moment Melun hesitated, then he laughed. “I never realised before,” he said steadily, almost with insolence, “that the blackmailer could be blackmailed.” “Nevertheless,” said Westerham, “such is the case.” “It is with every confidence,” the baronet continued, “that I make you my present offer. You have divined my secret just as I have divined yours; it would, however, be just as well for both if I explained every motive of my action.” He paused and looked for a moment almost shyly out of the port-hole, which swung up and down between sea and sky. “Where I have been,” he said, “women are few and far between. I never cared for any of them—until—until—I saw this picture.” He tapped his breast lightly. “Do you think,” he continued, his voice rising louder again, “that I should ever have set out for England if I had not been drawn back by this?” He tapped his breast again. Then his eyes grew wider and his nostrils distended. “I suppose,” he cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice, “that I am a poet. But I am a poet of the open air. Do you think that I care a glass of barbed-wire whisky for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world? I began life, as they call it, in England, when I was young. What do you think I care for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie land, the tall, blue grass, the open sky, the joy of the weary body that has ridden hard after cattle all the day!” He laughed shortly. “Do you think,” he continued, extending an almost melodramatically gesticulating hand towards the astonished captain, “that there is any soft, silk-bound pillow in Mayfair that could appeal to me when I could sleep under the stars?” “Heavens!” He reached out his arms and brought them to his sides again with a strenuous motion, all his muscles contracted. “I have learnt,” he cried, “the lesson that life is not only real and earnest, but that life is hard, that life is a battle—a battle to be won!” His eyes fell upon his strong, sinewy, brown hands, and he clenched his fists. “I am not going back to England to make pleasure, but to fight—to win the girl of the picture—from you!” But now, to Westerham's surprise, Melun had turned to sneering. The baronet was a breed of man the captain did not understand; no man that he had as yet been acquainted with loosed his heart in this wild manner. It seemed to him that Westerham was but a romantic child. But there was no childhood, no romance, in the bitter gaze he lifted his eyes to meet. “Listen,” said Westerham, quietly, “for a hundred thousand pounds I expect you to place yourself at my disposal. For a hundred thousand pounds I expect not only your services, but the services of all those whom you employ. And the greatest of these services will be silence.