"Mr. Cameron is waiting in the grill-room, sir," the man replied.
"How about having the dinner to-morrow evening?" he asked.--"Good! That's very nice indeed--will seven-thirty be convenient? All right--seven-thirty it is."
The grill was comfortably filled; the talk was of but one subject:--Amherst's return, what it signified and what would follow.
"It's too late to kill him," said Devonshire, as Pendleton entered the room, "but if I were Lorraine, I should get me a good hefty raw-hide and beat him within an inch of his life, paying particular attention to his handsome face. When I was through with him there wouldn't be much beauty left, I can tell you."
"But can Lorraine do it--has he the strength?" asked Smithers.
"In such a case the rightness of his cause would give him strength," Devonshire returned--"and any decent chap who was handy would lend him assistance if it was needed."
"The trouble is with Lorraine himself, I think," Carstairs remarked. "It isn't that he hasn't the nerve, but that he hasn't the determination, the stability, the something essential in the man who _does_. I fancy he has changed his mind on the subject of what to do in this matter as often as he has changed his clothes. He is a queer compound--none other like him."
"And yet he is a mighty attractive fellow at times," Smithers observed.--"It wasn't until this Amherst affair that he revealed anything particularly vacillating."
"He never before had occasion to reveal it," Devonshire explained. "The trial came--and he wasn't equal to it. Some of us might not be equal to it either, if we were in similar case. It's a mighty difficult case, my friends. Moreover, Lorraine has done the decent thing now--he is anxious for a reconciliation."
"It's decent, after a fashion," Smithers agreed--"it would be decenter if he first followed your notion and beat up Amherst--beat him until he couldn't walk; half killing would be about right, to my mind."
"This is all very well by way of discussion but what by way of prophecy?" said Carstairs. "I'll lay a bottle of wine that Lorraine doesn't do a damn thing."
"So will I," Smithers agreed. "That is why Amherst has the courage to come back. He despises the man he has wronged."