"Really," he said, "I fail to understand.... I must ask you to leave my
room!"

"You fail to understand? You cad!" Ernest cried. He stepped to the
writing-table and opened the secret drawer with a blow. A bundle of
manuscripts fell on the floor with a strange rustling noise. Then,
seizing his own story, he hurled it upon the table. And behold--the last
pages bore corrections in ink that could have been made only a few
minutes ago!

Reginald smiled. "Have you come to play havoc with my manuscripts?" he
remarked.

"Your manuscripts? Reginald Clarke, you are an impudent impostor! You
have written no word that is your own. You are an embezzler of the mind,
strutting through life in borrowed and stolen plumes!"

And at once the mask fell from Reginald's face.

"Why stolen?" he coolly said, with a slight touch of irritation. "I
absorb. I appropriate. That is the most any artist can say for himself.
God creates; man moulds. He gives us the colours; we mix them."

"That is not the question. I charge you with having wilfully and
criminally interfered in my life; I charge you with having robbed me of
what was mine; I charge you with being utterly vile and rapacious, a
hypocrite and a parasite!"

"Foolish boy," Reginald rejoined austerely. "It is through me that the
best in you shall survive, even as the obscure Elizabethans live in him