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 she-man, made Richard flush with anger, and drove him back on his deeper self once more.

"What do you call honest?" said Jack, sneering.

Richard became very silent, very still. He realised that Jack would like to give him a thrashing. The thought was horrible to Richard Lovat, who could never bear to be touched, physically. And the other man sitting there as if he were drunk was very repugnant to him. It was a bad moment.

"Why," he replied, in answer to the question, while Jack's eyes fixed him with a sort of jeering malevolence: "I can't honestly say I feel at one with you, you and Kangaroo, so I say so, and stand aside."

"You've found out all you wanted to know, I suppose?" said Jack.

"I didn't want to know anything. I didn't come asking or seeking. It was you who chose to tell me."

"You didn't try drawing us out, in your own way?"

"Why, no, I don't think so."

Again Jack looked up at him with a faint contemptuous smile of derision.

"I should have said myself you did. And you got what you wanted, and now are clearing out with it. Exactly like a spy, in my opinion."

Richard opened wide eyes, and went pale.

"A spy!" he exclaimed. "But it's just absurd."

Jack did not vouchsafe any answer, but sat there as if he had come for some definite purpose, something menacing, and was going to have it out with the other man.

"Kangaroo doesn't think I came spying, does he?" asked Richard, aghast. "It's too impossible."

"I don't know what he thinks," said Jack. ""But it isn't too impossible at all. It looks as if it had happened."

Richard was now dumb. He realised the depths of the other man's malevolence, and was aghast. Just aghast. Some fear too—and a certain horror, as if human beings had suddenly become horrible to him. Another gulf opened in front of him.

"Then what do you want of me now?" he asked, very coldly.

"Some sort of security, I suppose," said Jack, looking away at the sea.