“But if you were thrashed yourself?” Tremayne asked him, and the light in his grey eyes almost hinted at a dark desire to be himself the executioner. Samoval’s dark, handsome eyes considered the captain steadily. “To be thrashed myself?” he questioned. “My dear Captain, the idea of having hands laid upon me, soiling me, brutalising me, is so nauseating, so repugnant, that I assure you I should not hesitate to shoot the man who did it just as I should shoot any other wild beast that attacked me. Indeed the two instances are exactly parallel, and my country’s courts would uphold in such a case the justice of my conduct.” “Then you may thank God,” said O’Moy, “that you are not under British jurisdiction.” “I do,” snapped Samoval, to make an instant recovery: “at least so far as the matter is concerned.” And he elaborated: “I assure you, sirs, it will be an evil day for the nobility of any country when its Government enacts against the satisfaction that one gentleman has the right to demand from another who offends him.” “Isn’t the conversation rather too bloodthirsty for a luncheon-table?” wondered Lady O’Moy. And tactlessly she added, thinking with flattery to mollify Samoval and cool his obvious heat: “You are yourself such a famous swordsman, Count.” And then Tremayne’s dislike of the man betrayed him into his deplorable phrase. “At the present time Portugal is in urgent need of her famous swordsmen to go against the French and not to increase the disorders at home.” A silence complete and ominous followed the rash words, and Samoval, white to the lips, pondered the imperturbable captain with a baleful eye. “I think,” he said at last, speaking slowly and softly, and picking his words with care, “I think that is innuendo. I should be relieved, Captain Tremayne, to hear you say that it is not.” Tremayne was prompt to give him the assurance. “No innuendo at all. A plain statement of fact.” “The innuendo I suggested lay in the application of the phrase. Do you make it personal to myself?” “Of course not,” said Sir Terence, cutting in and speaking sharply. “What an assumption!” “I am asking Captain Tremayne,” the Count insisted, with grim firmness, notwithstanding his deferential smile to Sir Terence. “I spoke quite generally, sir,” Tremayne assured him, partly under the suasion of Sir Terence’s interposition, partly out of consideration for the ladies, who were looking scared. “Of course, if you choose to take it to yourself, sir, that is a matter for your own discretion. I think,” he added, also with a smile, “that the ladies find the topic tiresome.” “Perhaps we may have the pleasure of continuing it when they are no longer present.” “Oh, as you please,” was the indifferent answer. “Carruthers, may I trouble you to pass the salt? Lady O’Callaghan was complaining the other night of the abuse of salt in Portuguese cookery. It is an abuse I have never yet detected.”