“I’ll see you hanged first,” answered Cossey.  “What have I to gain by fighting you except a very good chance of being shot?  I have had enough of being shot as it is, and we will play this game out upon the old lines, until I win it.”

“As you like,” said Harold.  “I have made a suggestion to you which you do not see fit to accept.  As to the end of the game, it is not finished yet, and therefore it is impossible to say who will win it.  Perhaps you will be checkmated after all.  In the meanwhile allow me again to assure you that I consider you both a cur and a blackguard, and to wish you good-morning.”  And he bowed himself out, leaving Edward Cossey in a curious condition of concentrated rage.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE COLONEL GOES TO SLEEP

The state of mind is difficult to picture which could induce a peaceable christian-natured individual, who had moreover in the course of his career been mixed up with enough bloodshed to have acquired a thorough horror of it, to offer to fight a duel.  Yet this state had been reached by Harold Quaritch.

Edward Cossey wisely enough declined to entertain the idea, but the Colonel had been perfectly in earnest about it.  Odd as it may appear in the latter end of this nineteenth century, nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to put his life against that of his unworthy rival.  Of course, it was foolish and wrong, but human nature is the same in all ages, and in the last extremity we fall back by instinct on those methods which men have from the beginning adopted to save themselves from intolerable wrong and dishonour, or, be it admitted, to bring the same upon others.

But Cossey utterly declined to fight.  As he said, he had had enough of being shot, and so there was an end of it.  Indeed, in after days the Colonel frequently looked back upon this episode in his career with shame not unmingled with amusement, reflecting when he did so on the strange potency of that passion which can bring men to seriously entertain the idea of such extravagances.

Well, there was nothing more to be done.  He might, it is true, have seen Ida, and working upon her love and natural inclinations have tried to persuade her to cut the knot by marrying him off-hand.  Perhaps he would have succeeded, for in these affairs women are apt to find the arguments advanced by their lovers weighty and well worthy of consideration.  But he was not the man to adopt such a course.  He did the only thing he could do—­answered her letter by saying that what must be must be.  He had learnt that on the day subsequent to his interview with his rival the Squire had written to Edward Cossey informing him that a decided answer would be given to him on Christmas Day, and that thereon all vexatious proceedings on the part of that gentleman’s lawyers had been stayed for the time.  He could now no longer doubt what the answer would be.  There was only one way out of the trouble, the way which Ida had made up her mind to adopt.