"In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own interests," says Saxham's terrible voice, "you would undoubtedly be playing a very low-down game."
Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.
"A low-down game!... Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"
"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."
"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic, "your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's fair in Love and——'"
"Exactly. All is fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"—the break before the designation is scathingly contemptuous—"by that—distinguished nobleman himself, and by no other."
"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:
"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What matters is—your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals. Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place, should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."
His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:
"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"