“I have a fancy to talk to you seriously,” he said, without any preamble.

Arnold looked at him in some surprise.

“I am not a philanthropist,” continued Sabatini.  “When I move out of my regular course of life it is usually for my own advantage.  I warn you of that before we start.”

Arnold nodded and lit his cigarette fearlessly.  There was no safety in life, he reflected, thinking for the moment of the warning which he had received, like the safety of poverty.

“I am a man of forty-one,” Sabatini said.  “You, I believe, are twenty-four.  There can, therefore, be no impertinences in the truth from me to you.”

“There could be none in any case,” Arnold assured him.

Sabatini gazed thoughtfully across the table into his guest’s face.

“I do not know your history or your parentage,” he went on.  “Such knowledge is unnecessary.  It is obvious that your position at the present moment is the result of an accident.”

“It is the outcome of actual poverty,” Arnold told him softly.

Sabatini assented.

“Ah! well,” he said, “it is a poverty, then, which you have accepted.  Tell me, then, of your ambition!  You are young, and the world lies before you.  You have the gifts which belong to those who are born.  Are you doing what is right to yourself in working at a degrading employment for a pittance?”

“I must live,” Arnold protested simply.

“Precisely,” replied Sabatini.  “We all must live.  We all, however, are too apt to accept the rulings of circumstance.  I maintain that we all have a right to live in the manner to which we are born.”

“And how,” asked Arnold, “does one enforce that right?”

Sabatini leaned over and helped himself to the liqueur.

“You possess the gift,” he remarked, “which I admire most—­the gift of directness.  Now I would speak to you of myself.  When I was young, I was penniless, with no inheritance save a grim castle, a barren island, and a great name.  The titular head of my family was a Cardinal of Rome, my father’s own brother.  I went to him, and I demanded the means of support.  He answered me with an epigram which I will not repeat, besides which it is untranslatable.  I will only tell you that he gave me a sum equivalent to a few hundred pounds, and bade me seek my fortune.”

Arnold was intensely interested.

“Tell me how you started!” he begged.

“A few hundred pounds were insufficient,” Sabatini answered coolly, “and my uncle was a coward.  I waited my opportunity, and although three times I was denied an audience, on the fourth I found him alone.  He would have driven me out but I used the means which I have never known to fail.  I left him with a small but sufficient fortune.”

Arnold looked at him with glowing eyes.

“You forced him to give it you!” he exclaimed.

“Without a doubt,” Sabatini answered, coolly.  “He was wealthy and he was my uncle.  I was strong and he was weak.  It was as necessary for me to live as for him.  So I took him by the throat and gave him thirty seconds to reflect.  He decided that the life of a Cardinal of Rome was far too pleasant to be abandoned precipitately.”