Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal whistles. Then he gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, and begins:
"I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another woman's at the bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a bit sick at having brought an outsider—a rank outsider, by Gad!—into the family stud; you're not a rap ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as well as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had your fling, you'd have come in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having broken your mother's heart, though you know in the bottom of your soul that she scented this marriage in the wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down on her knees to him—her knees, by the Living Tinker!—to give you the chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection!"
Beauvayse is out of his chair now. "Is that true—about my mother?" he demands, blazing.
"I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states Captain Bingo huffily.
"Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you find—that—out?"
"Your cousin Townham told me."
"Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy, pratin' little scandalmonger!"
Captain Bingo retorts irately:
"Damn him if you please; he's no friend of mine. As yours, what I ask you is, between man and man, how far have you gone in this fresh affair?"
Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his patched flannels, and says, adjusting a footstool with his toe over a crack in the board-flooring, as though the operation were a delicate one upon which much depended: