"I heard your riding praised this morning, Ty," said he, beaming with beneficence. They were alone. "Ha!" said Tyson, "did you?" "Rather. Binfield was asking where you picked your hunters up--got his eye on the kangaroo, I fancy. I ventured to suggest, in my agreeable way, that you bought them by the yard." Tyson looked furious. Louis went on, unconscious of his doom. "Old Morley went for me like a lunatic--said you didn't ride like a tailor, you rode like a _man_. Queer old buffer, Morley--couldn't think what was the matter with him." Tyson laid down his cue and held Stanistreet with a leveling gaze. "Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I've stood a good deal, but if you think I'm going to stand that, you're a greater fool than I took you for. What the hell do you mean by telling everybody about my private affairs?" "My dear Tyson, a man who rides to hounds regularly on a kangaroo has no private affairs, he is, _ipso facto_, a public character." He threw back his head and shouted his laughter. "You've built yourself an everlasting name." "Oh, no doubt. If Morley knows it everybody knows it. You might just as well confide in the town-crier." He sat down and pressed his hands to his forehead. "This," he said bitterly, "accounts for everything." Stanistreet stared at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What _is_ the matter with you?" "Nothing. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. I only ask you, so long as you are in it, to mind your own business." "I can't. I haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I don't say much, Stanistreet, but I think a damned deal." "My dear Orlando Furioso, surely a harmless jest--" "So you think it funny, do you, to tell these people that my father was a tailor? It wouldn't be funny if it was false; but as it happens to be true, it's simply stupid." "I never said your father was a tailor." "Don't trouble yourself to lie about it. He _was_ a tailor. The minuteness of his business only added to the enormity of his crime. He was born in an attic on a pile of old breeches. He was a damned dissenter--called himself a Particular Baptist. He kept a stinking slopshop in Bishopsgate Street, and a still more stinking schism-shop in Shoreditch." ("Why the devil shouldn't he?" murmured Louis.) "Salvation free, gratis, for nothing, and five per cent, discount for ready money."