"Not yet. You and I have to settle accounts first. You have behaved like a tyrant. A tyrant—that’s the only word for it! If I was guilty of insubordination, you were guilty of outrage. You had a right to arrest me, and to order that I should be court-martialled, but what right had you to condemn me before I was tried and punish me before I was sentenced? Before or after, what right had you to break my sword and tear off my medals? Degradation is obsolete in the British Army—what right had you to degrade me? Before my father, too, and before Helena—what _right_ had you?" "Leave my house instantly; leave it, leave it!" said the General, his voice coming thick and hoarse. "Not till you hear what I’ve come to tell you," said Gordon, and then he repeated the threat—who knows on what inherited cell of his brain imprinted—which his father had made forty years before. "I’ve come to tell you that I’ll go back to my quarters and you shall court-martial me to-morrow _if you dare_. Before that, England may know by what is done to-night that I refused to obey your order because I’m a soldier, not a murderer. But if she never knows," he cried, in his breaking voice, "and you try me and condemn me and degrade me even to the ranks, I’ll get up again—do you hear me?—I’ll get up again, and win back all I’ve lost and more—until I’m your own master and you’ll have to obey _me_." The General’s face became scarlet, and lifting his hand as if to strike Gordon, he cried, in a choking voice— "Go, before I do something——" But Gordon in the delirium of his rage heard nothing except the sound of his own quivering voice. "More than that," he said, "I’ll win back Helena. She was mine, and you have separated her from me and broken her heart as well as my own. Was that the act of a father, or of a robber and a tyrant? But she will come back to me, and when you are dead and in your grave we shall be together, because ... Stop that! Stop it, I say!" The General, unable to command himself any longer, had snatched up the broken sword from the floor and was making for Gordon as if to smite him. "Stand away! You are an old man and I am not a coward. Drop that, or by God you——" But the General, losing himself utterly, flung himself on Gordon with the broken sword, his voice gone in a husky growl and his breath coming in hoarse gusts. The struggle was short but terrible. Gordon in the strength of his young manhood first laid hold of the General by the upper part of the breast to keep him off, and then, feeling that his hand was wounded, he gripped at the old man’s throat with fingers that clung like claws. At the next moment he snatched the sword from the General, and at the same instant, with a delirious laugh, he flung the man himself away. The General fell heavily with a deep groan and a gurgling cry. Gordon, with a contemptuous gesture, threw the broken sword on the floor, and then with the growl of a wild creature he turned to go.