"It is all very well," Mrs. Hale was saying in an aggressive manner, "but it was nothing short of murder in cold blood. And if you had been in any other quarter of the globe when you did it, you would not have escaped to tell the tale to us here."
"My dear Mrs. Hale—excuse me—I am not telling the tale to you here. I have not the slightest intention of doing so."
"But everybody knows it, of course."
"I think not," said Mr. Dalrymple.
"That you had a quarrel with a man who had once been your friend," proceeded Mrs. Hale, with a vulgar woman's unscrupulousness about trespassing on sacred ground; "and that you hunted him round the world, and then, when you met him in that Californian diggings place, shot him across a billiard-table where he stood, without a moment's warning."
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Dalrymple, calmly; "he had plenty of warning—five years at least."
"Not five minutes after you met him. Mr. Gordon was there, and said that he was a dead man five minutes after you came into the room and recognised him."
"Gordon can tell you, then, that I satisfied all the laws of honour. The meeting had been arranged and expected; there were no preliminaries to go through—except to borrow a couple of revolvers and get somebody to see fair play. There were at least a dozen to do that; Gordon was one."
"Poor fellow," ejaculated Mrs. Hardy with solemn indignation. "And he fired in the air, I suppose?"
"He would have fired in the air, I daresay, if he had any hope that I would do so," replied Mr. Dalrymple, with a face as hard as flint, and a deep blaze of passion in his eyes. "But he well knew that there was no chance of that. He was obliged to shoot his best in self-defence."