The demand was made in the same easy, buoyant tone. Herriard nodded.
“No doubt it is,” he answered curtly.
“So long as I lay in my living grave on that couch,” pursued Gastineau, exhaling a long whiff of smoke, “I looked upon my past life, my former existence as a closed book. I anticipated no reason ever to unclasp it. But I reckoned without our Dr. Hallamar.”
“Yes,” Herriard responded, as the other man paused.
“Now,” Gastineau continued, always in his tone of airy argument, “it being agreed that my coming to active life again must upset all calculations, the question, among others, of its interference with our reciprocal arrangement, our partnership, comes up.”
“Naturally,” Herriard acquiesced readily.
“Naturally.” Gastineau took up the word. “I wake to life to find you filling the place which rightly belongs to me, and which I want, or, at least, might want to occupy myself.”
“Yes,” replied Herriard quietly, “and which in common justice I should have no wish to keep from you.”
Gastineau took the cigarette from his lips with a deprecating wave of the hand. “Don’t be in a hurry, Mr. Geoffrey Herriard,” he said, with a patronizing laugh. “I am not at all sure that I want your place, and if I did, I fancy there is room in the world, legal and political, for both of us. It is not there, in the House, or at the Bar, that we are likely to be rivals.”
Naturally he would not guess how clear the significance of his last words was to Herriard who sat watching and wondering what place there could be in the world for this callous, gibing man-slayer. “I don’t see why we should be rivals at all,” he observed tentatively.