it
meant was connected with his entertainer's slightly marked appeal to
him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew
by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant
that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide space with a
new consciousness.

Everything had changed--changed extraordinarily with the mere turning
of that gentleman's back, the treacherous aspect of which its owner
couldn't surely have suspected. If the question was of the pitch of
their sensibility, at all events, it wouldn't be Mark's that should
vibrate to least purpose. Visibly it had come to his host that something
had within the few instants remarkably happened, but there glimmered on
him an induction that still made him keep his own manner. Newton himself
might now resort to any manner he liked. His eyes had raked the floor to
recover the position of something dropped or misplaced, and something,
above all, awkward or compromising; and he had wanted his companion not
to command this scene from the hearth-rug, the hearthrug where he had
been just before holding him, hypnotising him to blindness, _because_
the object in question would there be most exposed to sight Mark
embraced this with a further drop--while the apprehension penetrated--of
his power to go on, and with an immense desire at the same time that his
eyes should seem only to look at his friend; who broke out now, for that
matter, with a fresh appeal. "Aren't you going to take advantage of me,
man--aren't you going to _take_ it?"

Everything had changed, we have noted, and nothing could more have
proved it than the fact that, by the same turn, sincerity of desire
had dropped out of Winch's chords, while irritation, sharp and almost
imperious, had come in. "That's because he sees I see something!" Mark
said to himself; but he had no need to add that it shouldn't prevent his
seeing more--for the simple reason that, in a miraculous fashion, this
was exactly what he did do in glaring out the harder. It was beyond
explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy
steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion
lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of
a rug, at the point where an arm-chair, pushed a little out of position,
over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something
small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the