"I shall not keep silence if I see fit to speak," retorted Rupert angrily.

"You have spoken a great deal too often of late," was the reply. "Owing to your representations I have been induced to tell my directors that Mr. Deane intended to go into partnership with your uncle, and—"

"Stop," interposed Rupert. "Let me contradict one canard at a time. I never said Mr. Deane would go into partnership with Mr. Mortomley, but you did, and I then told you Mr. Deane would do no such thing. You then suggested he might lend money to the concern. I told you he would not. Of course you will try to make your own story good, but mine is the true version of the affair."

With a shrug—which Mr. Forde believed to be of a style a Frenchman might have envied—the manager turned once again to Mortomley.

"We will waive that question for the present," he said. "I suppose you do not really want to go into the Gazette; you have no private reason for desiring to liquidate your affairs?"

"No, indeed," was the answer.

"And the act is, you tell me, not past recall?"

"It is not," said Mortomley.

Rupert clenched his hand and made a feint of thrusting his fist through a pane of glass as his relative spoke, but he refrained and said,

"Gibbons knows all about it."