After this speech, which was delivered with unusual animation, Hawbury lighted a cigar, which he puffed at most energetically.

“All right, old boy,” said Dacres.  “A fellow’s apt to judge others by himself, you know.  Don’t make any more set speeches, though.  I begin to understand your position.  Besides, after all—­”

Dacres paused, and the dark frown that was on his brow grew still darker.

“After all what?” asked Hawbury, who now began to perceive that another feeling besides jealousy was the cause of his friend’s gloomy melancholy.

“Well, after all, you know, old fellow, I fear I’ll have to give her up.”

“Give her up?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you said before, and you mentioned Australia, and that rot.”

“The more I think of it,” said Dacres, dismally, and regarding the opposite wall with a steady yet mournful stare—­“the more I think of it, the more I see that there’s no such happiness in store for me.”

“Pooh, man! what is it all about?  This is the secret that you spoke about, I suppose?”

“Yes; and it’s enough to put a barrier between me and her.  Was I jealous?  Did I seem huffy?  What an idiot I must have been!  Why, old man, I can’t do any thing or say any thing.”

“The man’s mad,” said Hawbury, addressing himself to a carved tobacco-box on the table.

“Mad?  Yes, I was mad enough in ever letting myself be overpowered by this bright dream.  Here have I been giving myself up to a phantom—­an empty illusion—­and now it’s all over.  My eyes are open.”

“You may as well open my eyes too; for I’ll be hanged if I can see my way through this!”

“Strange! strange! strange!” continued Dacres, in a kind of soliloquy, not noticing Hawbury’s words.  “How a man will sometimes forget realities, and give himself up to dreams!  It was my dream of the child-angel that so turned my brain.  I must see her no more.”

“Very well, old boy,” said Hawbury.  “Now speak Chinese a little for variety.  I’ll understand you quite as well.  I will, by Jove!”

“And then, for a fellow that’s had an experience like mine—­before and since,” continued Dacres, still speaking in the tone of one who was meditating aloud—­“to allow such an idea even for a moment to take shape in his brain!  What an utter, unmitigated, unmanageable, and unimprovable idiot, ass, dolt, and blockhead!  Confound such a man!  I say; confound him!”

[Illustration:  “CONFOUND SUCH A MAN!  I SAY.”]

And as Dacres said this he brought his fist down upon the table near him with such an energetic crash that a wine-flask was sent spinning on the floor, where its ruby contents splashed out in a pool, intermingled with fragments of glass.

Dacres was startled by the crash, and looked at it for a while in silence.  Then he raised his head and looked at his friend.  Hawbury encountered his glance without any expression.  He merely sat and smoked and passed his fingers through his pendent whiskers.