In the hall the Devil and the Angel were having a most furious row.
"What I want to bring home to you," said the Devil, pressing a red-hot forefinger upon a smoking palm, "is that you've intruded. You've done something I only had the right to do. It was my place to suggest McTaggart passing the Emerald on!"
"It was nothing of the sort," said the Angel angrily. "You're like all devils; you won't listen to reason." Then he began to count off on the larger feathers of his wing. "Firstly, it's up to me to protect the young man. Secondly, it does no sort of harm if the 'tec finds that stone; why, it's all the better for him! It relieves a lot of honest and dishonest men from suspicion. Thirdly"— Here he hesitated, as theologians often do upon thirdly, thinking what he could scrape up. But the Devil interrupted him.
"Never mind your 'thirdly.' It's a dirty trick, slipping jewels into people's pockets! And dirty tricks are my stunts, not yours. Wasn't it me," he added with a rising grievance in his voice, "that made the old Don stick it into his pocket to begin with?"
Then the Angel played the trick which I am sorry to say is always being played upon poor devils: he played the trick of the superior person.
"Well," he said, "you may be right. I can't bother about it. I've got something else to do, and you can go back to hell."
The Devil, stung beyond endurance, grappled and closed. They wrestled magnificently and it was fifty-fifty—as it always is with devils and angels in this world—when the Angel began to get the worst of it. The Devil, though shorter, was in far better training—humanity had seen to that—and he was pressing the Angel down, when the Angel, without scruple, began to increase his size and strength prodigiously, till he towered above the poor Devil like a giant and half broke his back.
"You're cheating!" gasped the Devil. "You're working a miracle!"
"Anything's fair with devils!" said that most unjust Angel.
With which words he transferred himself into the sixth dimension, and the Devil, snubbed, angered, disappointed, impotent to revenge himself, burning to be eased by some ill deed, flew through the night to the Duchess's—it was only four miles—and inspired her with the odious thought that she should start yet another league for bothering the poor. After such beastly solace he went back for the moment to his own place.