“O’Moy,” he said, “I have known you these fifteen years, and we have been friends. Once you carried your friendship, appreciation, and understanding of me so far as nearly to ruin yourself on my behalf. You’ll not have forgotten the affair of Sir Harry Burrard. In all these years I have known you for a man of shining honour, an honest, upright gentleman, whom I would have trusted when I should have distrusted every other living man. Yet you stand there and confess to me the basest, the most dishonest villainy that I have ever known a British officer to commit, and you tell me that you have no explanation to offer for your conduct. Either I have never known you, O’Moy, or I do not know you now. Which is it?” O’Moy raised his arms, only to let them fall heavily to his sides again. “What explanation can there be?” he asked. “How can a man who has been--as I hope I have--a man of honour in the past explain such an act of madness? It arose out of your order against duelling,” he went on. “Samoval offended me mortally. He said such things to me of my wife’s honour that no man could suffer, and I least of any man. My temper betrayed me. I consented to a clandestine meeting without seconds. It took place here, and I killed him. And then I had, as I imagined--quite wrongly, as I know now--overwhelming evidence that what he had told me was true, and I went mad.” Briefly he told the story of Tremayne’s descent from Lady O’Moy’s balcony and the rest. “I scarcely know,” he resumed, “what it was I hoped to accomplish in the end. I do not know--for I never stopped to consider--whether I should have allowed Captain Tremayne to have been shot if it had come to that. All that I was concerned to do was to submit him to the ordeal which I conceived he must undergo when he saw himself confronted with the choice of keeping silence and submitting to his fate, or saving himself by an avowal that could scarcely be less bitter than death itself.” “You fool, O’Moy-you damned, infernal fool!” his lordship swore at him. “Grant overheard more than you imagined that night outside the gates. His conclusions ran the truth very close indeed. But I could not believe him, could not believe this of you.”’ “Of course not,” said O’Moy gloomily. “I can’t believe it of myself.” “When Miss Armytage intervened to afford Tremayne an alibi, I believed her, in view of what Grant had told me; I concluded that hers was the window from which Tremayne had climbed down. Because of what I knew I was there to see that the case did not go to extremes against Tremayne. If necessary Grant must have given full evidence of all he knew, and there and then left you to your fate. Miss Armytage saved us from that, and left me convinced, but still not understanding your own attitude. And now comes Richard Butler to surrender to me and cast himself upon my mercy with another tale which completely gives the lie to Miss Armytage’s, but confirms your own.”