“But I say yes!  You came for this, and you shall have it!  I tried to stop you, but you wanted it, and by God you shall have it!  You think your life’s been full and mine empty?  Ha ha!...  Romance!  I had the conviction of it, and I’ve had the courage too!  I haven’t told you a tenth of it!  What would you like?  Chamber-windows when Love was hot?  The killing of a man who stood in my way? (I’ve fought a duel, and killed.) The squeezing of the juice out of life like that?” He pointed to Romarin’s plate; Romarin had been eating grapes.  “Did you find me saying I’d do a thing and then drawing back from it when we—­” he made a quick gesture of both hands towards the middle of the restaurant floor.

“When we fought—?”

“Yes, when we fought, here!...  Oh no, oh no!  I’ve lived, I tell you, every moment!  Not a title, not a degree, but I’ve lived such a life as you never dreamed of—!”

“Thank God—­”

But suddenly Marsden’s voice, which had risen, dropped again.  He began to shake with interior chuckles.  They were the old, old chuckles, and they filled Romarin with a hatred hardly to be borne.  The sound of the animal’s voice had begun it, and his every word, look, movement, gesture, since they had entered the restaurant, had added to it.  And he was now chuckling, chuckling, shaking with chuckles, as if some monstrous tit-bit still remained to be told.  Already Romarin had tossed aside his napkin, beckoned to the waiter, and said, “M’sieu dines with me....”

“Ho ho ho ho!” came the drunken sounds.  “It’s a long time since M’sieu dined here with his old friend Romarin!  Do you remember the last time?  Do you remember it? Pif, pan!  Two smacks across the table, Romarin—­oh, you got it in very well!—­and then, brrrrr! quick!  Back with the tables—­all the fellows round—­Farquharson for me and Smith for you, and then to it, Romarin!...  And you really don’t remember what it was all about?...”

Romarin had remembered.  His face was not the face of the philosophic master of Life now.

“You said she shouldn’t—­little Pattie Hines you know—­you said she shouldn’t—­”

Romarin sprang half from his chair, and brought his fist down on the table.

“And by Heaven, she didn’t!  At least that’s one thing you haven’t done!”

Marsden too had risen unsteadily.

“Oho, oho?  You think that?”

A wild thought flashed across Romarin’s brain.

“You mean—?”

“I mean?...  Oho, oho!  Yes, I mean!  She did, Romarin....”

The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a great half-circle before Romarin’s eyes.  The next moment, feeling as if he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance, he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled