n, were perhaps out of place.

He had never been trained in the voicing of his thoughts, and, ever since
he had been wounded, felt at times a kind of desperate looseness in his
head. It was not, therefore, remarkable that he should be liable to
misconstruction, more especially by those who had nothing in common with
him, except that somewhat negligible factor, common humanity. The
Dallisons had misconstrued him as much as, but no more than, he had
misconstrued them when, as "Westminister" had informed Hilary, he "went
on against the gentry." He was, in fact, a ragged screen, a broken
vessel, that let light through its holes. A glass or two of beer, the
fumes of which his wounded head no longer dominated, and he at once
became "dreadful foreign." Unfortunately, it was his custom, on
finishing his work, to call at the "Green Glory." On this particular
afternoon the glass had become three, and in sallying forth he had felt a
confused sense of duty urging him to visit the house where this girl for
whom he had conceived his strange infatuation "carried on her games."
The "no-tale-bearing" tradition of a soldier fought hard with this sense
of duty; his feelings were mixed when he rang the bell and asked for Mrs.
Dallison. Habit, however, masked his face, and he stood before her at
"attention," his black eyes lowered, clutching his peaked cap.

Blanca noted curiously the scar on the left side of his cropped black
head.

Whatever Hughs had to say was not said easily.

"I've come," he began at last in a dogged voice, "to let you know. I
never wanted to come into this house. I never wanted to see no one."

Blanca could see his lips and eyelids quivering in a way strangely out of
keeping with his general stolidity.

"My wife has told you tales of me, I suppose. She's told you I knock her
about, I daresay. I don't care what she tells you or any o' the people
that she works for. But this I'll say: I never touched her but she
touched me first. Look here! that's marks of hers!" and, drawing up his
sleeve he showed a scratch on his sinewy tattooed forearm. "I've not
come here about her; that's no business of anyone's."

Bianca turned towards her pictures. "Well?" she said, "but what have
you come about, please? You see I'm busy."

Hughs' face changed. Its stolidity vanished, the eyes became as quick,
passionate, and leaping as a dark torrent. He was more violently alive
than she had ever seen a man. Had it be