At last when Wellington spoke his voice had assumed a gentler
note.

"O'Moy," he said, "I have known you these fifteen years, and we
have been friends. Once you carried your friendship, appreciation,
and understanding of me so far as nearly to ruin yourself on my
behalf. You'll not have forgotten the affair of Sir Harry Burrard.
In all these years I have known you for a man of shining honour,
an honest, upright gentleman, whom I would have trusted when I
should have distrusted every other living man. Yet you stand there
and confess to me the basest, the most dishonest villainy that I
have ever known a British officer to commit, and you tell me that
you have no explanation to offer for your conduct. Either I have
never known you, O'Moy, or I do not know you now. Which is it?"

O'Moy raised his arms, only to let them fall heavily to his sides
again.

"What explanation can there be?" he asked. "How can a man who has
been - as I hope I have - a man of honour in the past explain such
an act of madness? It arose out of your order against duelling,"
he went on. "Samoval offended me mortally. He said such things to
me of my wife's honour that no man could suffer, and I least of any
man. My temper betrayed me. I consented to a clandestine meeting
without seconds. It took place here, and I killed him. And then
I had, as I imagined - quite wrongly, as I know now - overwhelming
evidence that what he had told me was true, and I went mad."
Briefly he told the story of Tremayne's descent from Lady O'Moy's
balcony and the rest.