Page:Magician 1908.djvu/46

 at a dead antelope, scamper away in terror when the King of Beasts stalked down to make his meal.”

Clayson slammed the door behind him. Haddo was left with Margaret, and Arthur Burdon, Dr. Porhoët, and Susie. He smiled quietly.

“By the way, are you a lion-hunter?” asked Susie flippantly.

He turned on her his straight uncanny glance.

“I have no equal with big game. I have shot more lions than any man alive. I think Jules Gérard, whom the French of the nineteenth century called Le Tueur de Lions, may have been fit to compare with me, but I can call to mind no other.”

This statement, made with the greatest calm, caused a moment of silence. Margaret stared at him with amazement.

“You suffer from no false modesty,” said Arthur Burdon.

“False modesty is a sign of ill-breeding, from which my birth amply protects me.”

Dr. Porhoët looked up with a smile of irony.

“I wish Mr. Haddo would take this opportunity to disclose to us the mystery of his birth and family. I have a suspicion that, like the immortal Cagliostro, he was born of unknown but noble parents, and educated secretly in Eastern palaces.”

“In my origin I am more to be compared with Denis Zachaire or with Raymond Lully. My ancestor, George Haddo, came to Scotland in the suite of Anne of Denmark, and when James I., her consort, ascended the English throne, he was granted the estates in Staffordshire which I still possess.