“It’s this way,” he explained, stammeringly; “I’m a British officer and gentleman.  I’m a little more than that—­since I’m a V.C. man—­and a fellow—­dash it all, I might as well say it!—­I’m a fellow they’ve got their eye on—­in the line of high office, don’t you know?  And I can’t—­I simply can’t—­let a chap like that make me a present of all his chances—­”

“Did he have any?”

Ashley hesitated.  “Before God, sir, I don’t know—­but I’m inclined to think—­he had.  If so, I suppose they’re of as much value to him as mine to me.”

“But not of any more.”

He hesitated again.  “I don’t know about that.  Perhaps they are.  The Lord knows I don’t say that lightly, for mine are—­Well, we needn’t go into that.  But I’ve got a good deal in my life, and I don’t imagine that he, poor devil—­”

“Oh, don’t worry.  A rich soil is never barren.  When nothing is planted in it, Nature uses it for flowers.”

Ashley answered restively.  “I see, sir, your sympathies are all on his side.”

“Not at all.  Quite the contrary.  My certainties are on his side.  My sympathies are on yours.”

“Because you think I need them.”

“Because I think you may.”

“In case I—­”

“In case you should condemn yourself in the thing you’re going to allow.”

“But what’s it to be?”

“That’s for you to settle with yourself.”

He was silent a minute.  When he spoke it was with some conviction.  “I should like to do the right thing, by Jove!—­the straight thing—­if I only knew what it was.”

“Oh, there’ll be no trouble about that.  In the Street called Straight, my son, there are lights to show the way.”

* * * * *

“Rum old cove,” was Ashley’s comment to himself as he went back to Boston.  “Got an answer to everything.”

From the hotel he telephoned an excuse to Olivia for his unceremonious departure from Tory Hill.  “Had an upset,” was the phrase by which he conveyed his apologies, leaving it to her to guess the nature of his mischance.  As she showed no curiosity on the point, he merely promised to come to luncheon in the morning.

During his dinner he set himself to think, though, amid the kaleidoscopic movement of the hotel dining-room, he got little beyond the stage of “mulling.”  Such symptoms of decision as showed themselves through the evening lay in his looking up the dates of sailing of the more important liners, and the situation of the Carral country on the map.  He missed, however, the support of his principle to be Rupert Ashley at his best.  That guiding motto seemed to have lost its force owing to the eccentricities of American methods of procedure.  If he was still Rupert Ashley, he was Rupert Ashley sadly knocked about, buffeted, puzzled, grown incapable of the swift judgment and prompt action which had hitherto been his leading characteristics.