“You’re but a lazy fellow. You like your peach growing at your elbow. You’ve been afraid of hurting my feelings ... you have been so long regarded as my possession! Oh, Tony, that’s all over now. Listen—if you don’t know the ways of woman, who does? The case is very plain: that creature is planning to compromise David. I know how you can make love when you choose, and I know my fool of a brother. I’ll have her compromised first! And then——” She pressed her hands to her heart, then to her throat; for a moment or two the poor body had struck work. Only her eyes pleaded, threatened. “And then? Before the Lord, you ladies!” For all his _bonhommie de viveur_, Colonel Harcourt, of the First Guards, was known about Town to be a good deal of “a tiger,” as the cant of the day had it; and he held a justified reputation as an expert with the “saw-handle and hair-trigger.” Conscious of this, he went on: “Truly, Maud, it may well be said there’s never a man sent below but a woman showed the way! But is there not something a little crude in your plan?” “Crude! Have I time to be mealy-mouthed? I’m not asking you anything very hard, God knows! Merely to follow your own bent, Tony Harcourt; you have had your way with me, but that is over now, and you know it. I want you to devote yourself to that piece of country bloom instead. In three months you know what I shall be!...” “My dear Maud.... And then?” He was amused no longer: Lady Lochore was undeniably crude. “A regular conspiracy!” he went on. But, after a moment’s musing, a gleam came into his eye. “What of it!” he cried, “all’s fair in love and war—a soldier’s motto, and it has been mine! And as for you, why, your spirits would keep twenty alive!” She laughed scornfully. “It sounds better to say so, anyhow,” she retorted. “I don’t want any mewing over me. So it’s a bargain, Tony? For old sake’s sake you’ll go against all your principles and make love to a pretty woman? And we’ll have this new Pamela out of the citadel. We’ll have this scheming dairy-wench shown up in her true colours! My precious brother, as you know, or you don’t know, has got some rather freakish notions about women. He’s had a slap in the face once already, and it turned him silly. Disgust him of this second love affair, he’ll never have a third and I shall die in peace. You have marked the affectionate, fraternal way in which he treats me! I had to force my way back into this house. He’ll never forgive me for marrying Lochore—and as for Lochore himself, to the trump of doom David will never forgive him for.... Bah! for doing him the best turn one man ever did another!” “And what was that?” asked the colonel, with a slight yawn.