"May I ask to what this talk is leading?"
"I hardly know how to proceed with you," complained the young Frenchman. "Once you did me a great service. You taught me to live and that to die by my own hand was cowardice. Monsieur, you taught me how to be a man."
"And you have remembered the lesson?" Dave inquired, with the same expressionless face.
"I at least know," the Frenchman returned, "that a man should remember and serve his friends."
"Then you have been serving me?"
"I have been working hard, swallowing insult and stifling my sense of decency as far as possible, in order that I might serve you and prove myself worthy to be your friend," replied Surigny, with such earnestness that Darrin now found himself staring in open-eyed astonishment at the young nobleman.
"Perhaps you are going to try to offer me particulars of how you have been preparing to serve me," Dave said with a shrug.
"Monsieur," cried the Frenchman, as if in sudden desperation, "are you prepared to accept my word as you would wish your own to be accepted?"
"Wouldn't that be asking considerable of a comparative stranger?"
"Then answer me upon your own honor, Monsieur Darrin," the Count of Surigny appealed eagerly. "Do you consider me a gentleman or—a rascal?"