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 strike their attitudes, and deliver their high speeches with the most poignant effect. You know that you are pierced, not by a natural emotion, but by art and a studied utterance. I had this feeling in the most intensified degree when my subtle enemy announced, with wonderful seeming candour, the price I had to pay. Of a sudden, however, his gravity was exchanged for a laughter equally insincere. At first I took it for the mere brutality of mockery in the playhouse manner, but as again and again it returned upon him, and rose to a horrible hysteria, it was presently borne upon me that I was not so much the object of his hollow mirth, as the agonised James Grantley.

Despite the magnitude of his demand, I was not slow to answer. Though I had an instinct that this momentous circumstance demanded at least a day and a night for ponderation, I felt quite incapable of coolly considering it for twenty seconds. Conscious of nothing beyond the blood droning in my brain, I replied to my enemy:

"Captain, I accept the conditions you have named."

Perhaps the man was not prepared for this, for his face grew painful in its pallor, while the fire burned deeper in his eyes.

"Madam," says he, in a voice hardly to be endured. "I suppose you are aware that this will ruin me?"

"And you, sir," I said, politely, "that I shall be damned eternally?"