“We set the pace,” said I.  “You’ve allowed that.”

“To be sure we did.  We even modified the code a bit—­to its hurt; though as conscious outsiders we could dare very little.  For instance, the talk of our associates about women—­and no doubt their thoughts, too—­grew sensibly baser.  The sanctity of gambling debts, on the other hand, we did nothing to impair:  because we had money.  I recall your virtuous indignation at the amount of paper floated by poor W——­ towards the end of the great baccarat term.  Poor devil!  He paid up—­or his father did—­and took his name off the books.  He’s in Ceylon now, I believe.  At length you have earned a partial right to sympathise:  or. would have if only you had paid up.”

“Take care, Gervase.”

“My good Sir, don’t miss my point.  Wasn’t I just as indignant with W—?  If I’d been warned off Newmarket Heath, if I’d been shown the door of the hell we’re sitting in, shouldn’t I feel just as you are feeling?  Try to understand!”

“You forget Elaine, I think.”

“No:  I do not forget Elaine.  We left College:  I to add money to money in my father’s office; you to display your accomplishments in spending what your father had earned.  That was the extent of the difference.  To both of us, money and the indulgence it buys meant everything in life.  All I can boast of is the longer sight.  The office-hours were a nuisance, I admit:  but I was clever enough to keep my hold on the old set; and then, after office-hours, I met you constantly, and studied and hated you—­studied you because I hated you.  Elaine came between us.  You fell in love with her.  That I, too, should fall in love with her was no coincidence, but the severest of logic.  Given such a woman and two such men, no other course of fate is conceivable.  She made it necessary for me to put hate into practice.  If she had not offered herself, why, then it would have been somebody else:  that’s all.  Good Lord!” he rapped the table, and his voice rose for the first time above its level tone of exposition, “you don’t suppose all my study—­ all my years of education—­were to be wasted!”

He checked himself, eyed me again, and resumed in his old voice—­

“You wanted money by this time.  I was a solicitor—­your old college friend—­and you came to me.  I knew you would come, as surely as I knew you would not fire that pistol just now.  For years I had trained myself to look into your mind and anticipate its working.  Don’t I tell you that from the first you were the only real creature this world held for me?  You were my only book, and I had to learn you:  at first without fixed purpose, then deliberately.  And when the time came I put into practice what I knew:  just that and no more.  My dear Reggie, you never had a chance.”

“Elaine?” I muttered again.

“Elaine was the girl for you—­or for me:  just that again and no more.”

“By George!” said I, letting out a laugh.  “If I thought that!”