Now into his hand Fate had thrust a stouter weapon and a deadlier: a weapon which not only should make him master of the wealth that I had pledged, but one whereby he might remove me for all time, a thousandfold more effectively than the mere encompassing of my ruin would have done.
I was doomed.

I realized it fully and very bitterly.
I was to go out of the ways of men unnoticed and unmourned; as a rebel, under the obscure name of another and bearing another's sins upon my shoulders, I was to pass almost unheeded to the gallows.

Bardelys the Magnificent--the Marquis Marcel Saint-Pol de Bardelys, whose splendour had been a byword in France--was to go out like a guttering candle.
The thought filled me with the awful frenzy that so often goes with impotency, such a frenzy as the damned in hell may know.

I forgot in that hour my precept that under no conditions should a gentleman give way to anger.

In a blind access of fury I flung myself across the table and caught that villainous cheat by the throat, before any there could put out a hand to stop me.
He was a heavy man, if a short one, and the strength of his thick-set frame was a thing abnormal.