Bill rolled his cigar butt to the opposite corner of his mouth, and said nothing.
Anon he tossed the stump into the fireplace, and searched his pockets vainly for another cigar. Sir Harry tendered his well-filled case.
"I will go further," he said, as Bill struck a match, "I tell you that I think you ought to abandon your object, which is, in my humble opinion, unchristianlike and unlawful, but," he went on, "if you still have this grievance——"
"Oh, she's there all right, all right," Bill assured him.
"Well, if that is so, wait, for heaven's sake wait, until he's out of Brockley."
He paced up and down the room.
"Don't you see, my good man, how the whole thing compromises me? I'm known to dislike the Duke—it wasn't known till the confounded fellow produced a newspaper to proclaim the fact—you are known as having been introduced by me—the thing is too horrible. Why, people would say that I instigated the thing!"
I do not attempt to work out the psychology of Sir Harry's attitude into decimal places. I shrink from suggesting that he would derive any satisfaction from the killing or wounding of the Duc de Montvillier.
Such a suggestion would border upon the preposterous, for Sir Harry was a Justice of the Peace of the County of Kent, and, as is very well known, crime amongst the J.P.'s of Kent is singularly and gratifyingly rare. They are a well-behaved and modest class of citizens, by nature gentle and diffident, in appearance mild and affable, pursuing their calm unbunkered way, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, as somebody so beautifully put it.
There are, of course, black sheep in every family, and it is conceivable that angry and base passions may glow in secret breasts, but basing my opinion upon published statistics, I confidently assert that the mere suggestions that Sir Harry's motives were homicidal in intention, may be dismissed as being too monstrous for serious consideration.