“I mean,” said the Colonel, “that I have little to offer you beyond the guesses and surmises of club talk. It will be for your own intelligence to penetrate through the obscurity afterwards. You understand me?” “I believe I understand you,” said Upton, slowly, and with the same quiet smile. Now, this cold, semi-sarcastic manner of Upton was the one sole thing in the world which the honest Colonel could not stand up against; he always felt as though it were the prelude to something cutting or offensive,--some sly impertinence that he could not detect till too late to resent,--some insinuation that might give the point to a whole conversation, and yet be undiscovered by him till the day following. Little as Harcourt was given to wronging his neighbor, he in this instance was palpably unjust; Upton's manner being nothing more than the impress made upon a very subtle man by qualities very unlike any of his own, and which in their newness amused him. The very look of satire was as often an expression of sorrow and regret that he could not be as susceptible--as easy of deception--as those about him. Let us pardon our worthy Colonel if he did not comprehend this; shrewder heads than his own had made the same mistake. Half to resent this covert slyness, half to arouse himself to any conflict before him, he said, in a tone of determination, “It is only fair to tell you that you are yourself to blame for anything that may have befallen poor Glencore.” “I to blame! Why, my dear Harcourt, you are surely dreaming.” “As wide awake as ever I was. If it had not been for a blunder of yours,--an unpardonable blunder, seeing what has come of it,--sending a pack of trash to me about salt and sulphur, while you forwarded a private letter about Glencore to the Foreign Office, all this might not have happened.” “I remember that it was a most disagreeable mistake. I have paid heavily for it, too. That lotion for the cervical vertebrae has come back all torn, and we cannot make out whether it be a phosphate or a prot'-oxide of bismuth. You don't happen to remember?”