“Thank you for the descriptive adjective, my little partizan, but you’re troubling yourself for me more than you need.  I don’t mind, really.  It’s all in a life-time, and I knew when I went in for this business, that I should have to take the rough with the smooth.  I was down on my luck, and glad to get anything.  What I have got is honest, and something that I know I can do well—­something I enjoy, too; and I’m not going to let a vulgar young snob like that make me ashamed of myself, when I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You ought to be proud of yourself, not ashamed!” I cried to him, trying to keep my eyes cold.

“Heaven knows there’s little enough to be proud of.  You’d see that, if I bored you with my history—­and perhaps I will some day.  But anyhow, I’ve nothing which I need to hide.”

“As if I didn’t know that!  But Bertie hates you.”

“I don’t much blame him for that.  In a way, the position in which we stand to each other is a kind of poetical justice.  I don’t blame myself, either, for I always did loathe a cad and Stokes is a cad par excellence.  He visited, more or less on suffrance, at two or three houses where I used to go a good deal, in my palmy days.  How he got asked, originally, I don’t exactly know, for the people weren’t a bit his sort; but money does a lot for a man in these days; and once in, he wasn’t easy to get rid of.  He had a crawling way with any one he hoped to squeeze any advantage out of—­”

“I suppose he crawled to you then,” I broke in.

“He did try it on, a bit, because I knew people he wanted to know; but it didn’t work.  I rather put myself out to be rude to him, for I resented a fellow like that worming himself into places where he had no earthly right to be—­no right of brains, or heart, or breeding.  I must admit, now I think of it, that he has several scores to wipe off; and judging from the way he begins, he will wipe hard.  Let him!”

“No, no,” I protested.  “You mustn’t let him.  It’s too much.  You will have to tell Sir Samuel that he must find a new chauffeur at once.  It hurts me like a blow to think of such a creature humiliating you.  I couldn’t see it done.”

He looked at me very kindly, with quite all a brother’s tenderness.  “My dear little pal,” he said, “you won’t have to see it.”

“You mean—­you will go?” Of course, I wanted him to take my advice, or I wouldn’t have offered it, yet it gave me a heartache to think he was ready to take it so easily.

“I mean that I’m not the man to let myself be humiliated by a Bertie Stokes.  Possibly he may persuade his stepfather to sack me, but I don’t think he’ll succeed in doing that, even if he tries.  Sir Samuel, I suppose, has given him every thing he has; sent him to Oxford (I know he was there, and scraped through by the skin of his teeth), and allows him thousands enough to mix with a set where he doesn’t belong; but though the old boy is weak in some ways, he has a strong sense of justice, and where he likes he is loyal.  I think he does like me, and I don’t believe he’d discharge me to please his stepson.  Not only that, I should be surprised if the promising Bertie wanted me discharged.  It would be more in his line to want me kept on, so that he might take it out of me.”