“How do you see it, pray?”
“You’ve got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you, that you’ve taken some oath on bloody bones, that you belong to some terrible gang. You seem to say to every one, ‘Slow torture won’t induce me to tell where it meets!’”
“You won’t get me an order then?” Hyacinth said in a moment.
“My dear boy, I offer you a box. I take the greatest interest in you.”
They smoked together a while and at last Hyacinth remarked: “It has nothing to do with the Subterranean.”
“Is it more terrible, more deadly secret?” his companion asked with extreme seriousness.
“I thought you pretended to be a radical,” Hyacinth returned.
“Well, so I am—of the old-fashioned, constitutional, milk-and-water, jog-trot sort. I’m not an exterminator.”
“We don’t know what we may be when the time comes,” Hyacinth observed more sententiously than he intended.
“Is the time coming then, my dear young friend?”