“Oh, damn the provocation.  You don’t suppose I came here to make you apologize?”

“I’m not going to apologize.  When I say you had provocation enough to justify your putting a bullet into me, I’m merely stating the conventional view.”

“Well—­yes.  If I hit you hard, it was all above the belt.”

“There are some vulnerable parts above the belt, though you mightn’t think it.”

“If it comes to that, Stanny, I must say you got your revenge.  Trust an old friend for knowing where to hit.  That fist of yours caught me in some very nasty places.  Suppose we shake hands.”

They shook hands.  Stanistreet’s hand was cold as ice.  He lowered himself into his chair, and lit a pipe in token of reconciliation.

He was magnanimous.  It was he who had done the wrong, and it was he who had pardoned.  He had always been sorry for that poor devil, Tyson.

Tyson was aware of this feeling, and he generally resented it; but at times like the present it gave him a curious sense of moral support.

The two men sat and smoked in a silence which Tyson, as usual, was the first to break.

“I wouldn’t like to swear,” said he, “that I don’t go abroad again before long.  It’s my only chance.  I’m knocked out of the game here.  It’s too quick, too hard, and the rules are too cursedly complicated.”

“All the same, I’d wait a bit before I flung it up, if I were you.”

“Wait?  Wait?  I’ve done nothing but wait ever since I came to this detestable country, and my chance never turned up.  It never will turn up—­here.”

“Why not?”

“My own fault, I suppose.  I’ve spent my life in going round and round the earth passionately in a circle.  I don’t say that perpetual rotation is a natural function of the ordinary human being; but it’s my function—­I’m good for nothing else.  And they expect a man with the world in his brain and the devil in his blood to live decently in this damnable city of fog and filth!  And when the world-madness comes on him nobody knows anything about this particular form of mania—­the poor wretch must get into a stiff shirt or a strait waistcoat and converse sanely with that innocent woman, his wife.  If he doesn’t there’s a scandal, and the devil to pay—­”

Stanistreet looked grave.  Whither was all this tending?  To a final abandonment of Mrs. Nevill Tyson?

“Of course, the mistake was to try.  There might have been a chance for me if I’d had a tithe of your sense.  But being what I am, I must needs go and marry.  It was the deed of a lunatic.”

“Isn’t it rather late to go back on that now?  What’s the good?”

“None, you fool, none.  And if there’s anything that stamps a man as a cur and a cad, it’s this vile habit of slanging the women for his own sins.  All the same—­I’m not blaming anybody but myself, mind—­all the same, I being what I am, there’s no doubt I married the wrong sort of woman.  I don’t mind making that confession to you.  I believe you know more about me than anybody, barring my Maker.”