"Really," he said at last, "you amuse me."

"Silence!" he cried imperatively, when the Italian would have broken out
into a torrent of expostulations. "Listen to me, you vain fool!"

This method of address had the rare merit of achieving its object. Capella
was reduced to a condition of speechless rage.

"You consider yourself the aggrieved person, I suppose," went on the
Englishman, subsiding into a state of contemptuous placidity. "You neglect
your wife, make love to an honourable and pure-minded girl, stoop to the
use of unworthy taunts and even criminal innuendos, lose such control of
your passion as to lay sacrilegious hands upon Helen Layton, and yet you
resent the well-merited punishment administered to you by her affianced
husband. Were I a surgeon, Mr. Capella, I might take an anatomical
interest in your brain. As it is, I regard you as a psychological study in
latter-day blackguardism. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. You have not yet answered my question. Will Hume fight?"

"I should say that nothing would give him greater pleasure."

"Then you will arrange this matter? I can send a friend to you?"

"And if you do I will send the police to you, thus possibly anticipating
matters somewhat."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that my sole purpose in life just now is to lay hands on the man