"Who said there was--pray?" said Skippy, whose hands were trembling with rage.
Mr. Tuptale looked up quickly, frowned and said:
"She told you I drank, and she told you I smoked."
"She did, of course, and I consider it was her duty to do so."
"Well is there anything wrong in that, I ask you?"
"Anything wrong in gambling, drunkenness, steeping oneself with tobacco until your hand shakes like a leaf?" said Mr. Tuptale, rising.
"Exactly. Do you know your ten commandments, sir?"
"Are you insulting me, sir?" said the curate, yielding to a perfectly natural irritation.
"Kindly point out to me in the ten commandments where any habit of mine is forbidden," said Skippy with the most impressive of declamatory attitudes.
Mr. Tuptale's jaw dropped, twice he tried to answer and twice remained inarticulate.
Skippy possessed himself of his hat and bowed in scorn.
"You will kindly restore to Miss Tupper this pin," he said, producing it after a struggle with his tie. "Also inform her that I shall immediately send back to her other articles I need not now specify. Thank you for your interest in my case but it is quite unnecessary--quite. I can stand by the ten commandments. Good night."
He went down the scrunching gravel and slammed the gate.
"And there is more, sir," he exclaimed aloud, forgetting that he was now alone. "One thing more. You can tell Miss Tupper that even among the lowest of my associates, gamblers and drunkards and race-track sharks though they be, a promise given is sacred, sacred, sir, and the man who breaks it is, is, is--"
But here rage quite overtook him and he picked up a stone and flung it at an inoffensive tree.
"It's all Snorky!" he said in the swift progress of moods. "I knew he'd overdo it! Holy Mike, what in Sam Hill did he tell Margarita! He must have--he--" But again imagination failed him and he proceeded on his way, fists sunk in his pockets, sliding along gloomy lanes.
"And I believed I had met a good woman!" he said bitterly. "Faugh, they're all alike. Well, I don't care what does become of me. Serve her right if I went plump to the bad. And by jingo, I'll do it too!"
Whereupon, having resolved upon a life of crime, he plunged his hand into his pocket and cast from him the now unnecessary cigarettes!
