"What a remarkable man Lord Tupping is!" "Yes." "So popular!" "So it appears." "Everybody is simply charmed with him! It is ’Lord Tupping this’ and ’Lord Tupping that’ on every hand!" "Yes, yes," said Sir Harry indulgently, "Tuppy is a good fellow." The good fellow at that moment was expostulating with Hal. "Now look here, Tanny, old friend," he said firmly. "I’m not goin’ to meet anybody else. I’m sick of this business an’ I’m dashed if I’m goin’ to stick it any longer." "It will be soon over, old man," soothed Hal, "we’ve finished the Duke." "Oh!" said Tuppy absently. "Yes—didn’t you see the letter he wrote to the governor in his rag." "No," said the innocent Tuppy. "What! not the bit about the vultures in the air, and the brazen sky!" "Blue sky," corrected Tuppy, and went on hastily, "I suppose you mean blue, don’t you?" "Blue or brazen," said Hal carelessly, "it was a lot of infernal rot." "My dear old feller," said Tuppy huffishly, "eminent strategist an’ military authority as you are, incisive analyst of character as you may be; rampin’ rhetorician an’ high steppin’ logician as in all probability you imagine yourself to be, I cannot accept your dictum on literary quality or diction. I thought that vulture touch was exceptionally imaginative, and the introduction of the blue sky supremely delicate." "Anybody would think that you had written that bit yourself," chaffed Hal. Tuppy was not to be appeased. "That’s beside the question," he complained. Then Alicia interrupted them. She monopolized Tuppy, and Hal, after a vain attempt to join in the conversation, withdrew a little sulkily. "Lord Tupping," she asked, "aren’t you feeling a terrible hypocrite?" "Not unusually so, dear lady," said Tuppy. "Sir Harry thinks that you are not on speaking terms with the Duke." Tuppy coughed. "At the present moment I ain’t," he confessed, "it is over a little question as to whether potatoes should be boiled with salt. I say without, but he’s a most obstinate beggar lately—since his trouble." Alicia ignored the addition. "Who wrote that dreadful letter," she asked suddenly. "What letter?" Tuppy’s face was a blank. "Oh, please don’t pretend that you are ignorant—that wretched letter full of nonsensical——" Tuppy drew himself up. "Dear lady," he said stiffly, "if you refer to the vultures——" With a woman’s quick intuition she guessed at the authorship of that piece of imagery. "No—I am not referring to that portion of the letter," she said tactfully, "in fact I thought that little touch rather fine," she added, inwardly praying for forgiveness, "but the letter in general—the whole idea, it was the Duke’s, of course?" "The less imaginative part was the Duke’s," confessed Tuppy, "the crude outlines, so to speak, the framework——"