"The words are yours, sir," responded Gorringe, coolly. "I do not object
to them."

"As you like," put in the other. "If it be so, why, then all the more
reason why I should, under the circumstances--"

"Under what circumstances?" interposed the lawyer. "Let us be clear
about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?"

He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight
protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the
black mustache.

"The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a
great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on."

"And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you
in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out
of date?"

"I understand your sneer well enough," retorted Theron, "but that
can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these
plants--or to smuggle them in--but never once deigned to hint to me that
you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not
have known to this day where they came from."

Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim
amusement about the corner of his mouth. "I should have thought," he
said with dry deliberation, "that possibly this fact might have raised