"
The accuser was exasperated.
"A couple o' years in quod will be about your mark, I'm thinking," he
said.
Whereupon Louis was suddenly inspired to answer:
"Yes. And supposing I was to begin to talk about illicit commissions?"
Horrocleave jumped up with such ferocious violence that Louis drew
back, startled. The recent Act of Parliament, making a crime of secret
commissions to customers' employees, had been a blow to the trade
in art-lustre ware, and it was no secret in the inner office that
Horrocleave, resenting its interference with the natural course
of business, had more than once discreetly flouted it, and thus
technically transgressed the criminal law. Horrocleave used to defend
and justify himself by the use of that word "technical." Louis' polite
and unpremeditated threat enraged him to an extreme degree. He was the
savage infuriate. He cared for no consequences, even consequences to
himself. He hated Louis because Louis was spick and span, and quiet,
and because Louis had been palmed off on him by Louis' unscrupulous
respectable relatives as an honest man.
"Now thou'st done for thyself!" he cried, in the dialect. "Thou'st
done for thyself! And I'll have thee by the heels for embezzlement,
and blackmail as well.
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