"Detain that man," he cried to the others, who came and stood on either side of me, and laid their hands on my shoulders.
I stood with my back to the table.
"Face him round," he ordered, his voice thick with anger.
The men forced me to turn round.
"Now, sir, I give you a last chance," he cried, pointing his finger at me and shaking it menacingly.
"I don't accept it," I answered recklessly. "I've had enough of this Inquisition process. I will have a public trial. I am not ashamed of what I have done; but I should be ashamed of myself if I stayed here to be bullied and browbeaten and insulted and sneered at by you. Do what you like."
My recklessness was a factor on which he had not calculated, and I could tell by his indecision how it perplexed him. Without my version of the plot he could not hope to get a full grasp of the facts, and I reckoned that in an affair of such real State importance he would be altogether unwilling to have any public trial.
"Leave us a moment," he said to the men; and when they had gone he asked, "Do you mean to persist in this obstinacy?"
"'Obstinacy!' Is that what you call my refusal to be a stalking-horse for your ill-conditioned flouts and gibes, after you have had me dragged three hundred or four hundred miles, and hauled in here that you may treat me like a dog or a thief, without even telling me the charge preferred against me? If that be obstinacy, then indeed I am obstinate, and shall remain so. But I will do more than that. I will appeal to the Emperor himself, and tell him the story to which you have refused a courteous ear."
"The Emperor does not concern himself with the private offences of every nameless adventurer in his empire."