om, I looked first at Frank, and his dominant emotion,
just then, appeared to be surprise. For a moment I had a sense of
reprieve. I guessed that he had not been truly convinced of the truth of
his own accusations against me. But any relief I may have felt was
dissipated at once. I saw Jervaise's look of surprise give place to a kind
of perplexed anger, an expression that I could only read as conveying his
amazement that any gentleman (I am sure his thought was playing about that
word) could be such a blackguard as I was now proving myself to be.

Ronnie Turnbull, also, evidently shared that opinion. The boyish and
rather theatrical movement with which he turned his back upon me, showed
at once that he had been coached in the suspicions that were now so
finally clinched.

"This fellow simply isn't worth speaking to," was the inarticulate message
of his gesture.

And certainly I gave neither of them any occasion to speak to me. Banks's
opening plunged us into one of those chaotic dialogues which are only made
more confused by any additional contribution.

"What have you come up here for?" Banks asked, displaying his immediate
determination to treat the invaders without respect of class on this
common ground of his father's home.

"That's our affair," Frank snapped. He looked nervously vicious, I
thought, like a timid-minded dog turned desperate.

"What the devil do you mean?" Turnbull asked at the same moment, and
Brenda got up from her chair and tried to address some explanation to her
lover through the ominous preparatory snarlings of the melee.

I heard her say, "Arthur! They've been trying to..." but lost the rest in
the general shindy.

Turnbull, by virtue of his lung-power, was the most audible of the four.

"You've jolly well got to understand, my good man," he was saying, "that
the sooner you get out of this the better"; and went on with more
foolishness about Banks having stolen the motor--all painfully tactless
stuff, if he still had the least intention of influencing Brenda, but he
was young and arrogant and not at all clever.

Banks and Jervaise were sparring at each other all the time that Turnbull
fulminated, and Brenda's soprano came in like a flageolet obbligato--a
word or two here and there ringing out with a grateful clearness above the
masculine accompaniment.

I dared, in the confusion, to glance at Anne, and she looked up at me at
the same moment. She was slightly withdrawn from the tumul