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THE SIEGE
57

well used to rebuffs; but he liked them none the better for that. But that the Honorable John Ruffin should have been the one to rebuff him filled him with a resentment bitter beyond all words.

It was a shock to his faith in human nature. He had always looked upon him as the model client, a striking type of the great body of the amiable whom a kindly Providence has provided to be the prey of sharks, the model client who pays sixty per cent., not without a murmur indeed, not even without pressure, but pays it. It was no wonder that he was filled with an extraordinary bitterness by this favorite client's revolt against the specious, but iniquitous, bond with which he had tricked his inexperience.

Besides this natural resentment at having been mistaken in his client, Mr. Montague Fitzgerald was wounded to the quick by the thought that he was going to lose forty per cent. of the sixty he had been expecting. He could not act on the Honorable John Ruffin's suggestion and take the case to the High Court because he would lose it in a fashion which would injure his lately injured business yet more. At one fell blow, and that from the hand of