“Yes,” he said, “it’s never too late to learn; and for once you’ve come up against someone a leetle bit too much for you.  Haven’t you now?  You’d better cry ‘Peccavi.’”

Then, in the deathly silence of the room, the moral force of his position, and the collapse as it seemed of his opponent, awakening a faint compunction, he took a turn over the Turkey carpet to readjust his mind.

“You’re an old man, and I don’t want to be too hard on you.  I’m only showing you that you can’t play fast and loose as if you were God Almighty any longer.  You’ve had your own way too many years.  And now you can’t have it, see!” Then, as the old man again moved forward in his chair, he added:  “Now, don’t get into a passion again; calm yourself, because I warn you—­this is your last chance.  I’m a man of my word; and what I say, I do.”

By a violent and unsuspected effort the old man jerked himself up and reached the bell.  Mr. Ventnor heard it ring, and said sharply: 

“Mind you, it’s nothing to me which you do.  I came for your own good.  Please yourself.  Well?”

He was answered by the click of the door and the old man’s husky voice: 

“Show this hound out!  And then come back!”

Mr. Ventnor had presence of mind enough not to shake his fist.  Muttering:  “Very well, Mr. Heythorp!  Ah!  Very well!” he moved with dignity to the door.  The careful shepherding of the servant renewed the fire of his anger.  Hound!  He had been called a hound!

3

After seeing Mr. Ventnor off the premises the man Meller returned to his master, whose face looked very odd—­“all patchy-like,” as he put it in the servants’ hall, as though the blood driven to his head had mottled for good the snowy whiteness of the forehead.  He received the unexpected order: 

“Get me a hot bath ready, and put some pine stuff in it.”

When the old man was seated there, the valet asked: 

“How long shall I give you, sir?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Very good, sir.”

Lying in that steaming brown fragrant liquid, old Heythorp heaved a stertorous sigh.  By losing his temper with that ill-conditioned cur he had cooked his goose.  It was done to a turn; and he was a ruined man.  If only—­oh! if only he could have seized the fellow by the neck and pitched him out of the room!  To have lived to be so spoken to; to have been unable to lift hand or foot, hardly even his voice—­he would sooner have been dead!  Yes—­sooner have been dead!  A dumb and measureless commotion was still at work in the recesses of that thick old body, silver-brown in the dark water, whose steam he drew deep into his wheezing lungs, as though for spiritual relief.  To be beaten by a cur like that!  To have that common cad of a pettifogging lawyer drag him down and kick him about; tumble a name which had stood high, in the dust!  The fellow had the power to make