"We are now quite alone, Lord Glisfoyle, and can speak plainly. You love Sarita Castelar, and hope to make her your wife?"
"I decline to discuss her with you, Senor Quesada."
"Well, then, I tell you she is pledged to marry me, and I will suffer no man on earth to take her from me."
"You did not speak so to your tool, Colonel Juan Livenza. I am aware of the infamous bargain you made with him."
"I will not allow anyone to take her from me," he said again, between his teeth, the increased tenseness of the tone being his only notice of my words. "You are an English nobleman, and presumably a man of courage. When you were here last time in my house, you struck me. You are now bent on ruining me, and have set everything on that venture. Owing to my sister's interference, you are free; and because she loves you, she is mad enough to stay my hands in dealing with you, knowing, what you also know, things that must be kept secret. And as a crowning stroke you threaten to rob me of the woman I love. Under those circumstances, what think you is the fitting course for two men—two enemies, if you will—placed as you and I are, to pursue?"
"If I understand you, I decline to discuss such a proposal."
"If you are a gentleman and a man of honour, and not a coward, you will find only one answer to my question," he said, his rage deepening in its quiet intensity with every sentence, till each word he uttered was a deliberate insult—an added knot on the lash of his bitter tongue. But I had my temper too well in hand to take fire.
"There are matters you forget. You set your bully, Livenza, upon me first; you used your power as Minister to destroy me; you ordered your police spies to dog me; and you had me gaoled in one of your filthy prisons. In this way you exhausted every means in your power to deal with me officially; and having schemed and tricked and bullied thus in vain, you find yourself at bay, and as a last resource you remember your honour with suspicious tardiness, and think of the means which the gentleman and the man of honour you speak of would have thought of first. I will not fight with you, Senor Quesada."
"You are a coward, then."
"I don't accept your standards in that matter."