of ceremony
which outsiders were not often permitted to hear him employ toward a
member of his favoured circle.

"Keep out of this, Edith, and you keep quiet, Lil. You girls make me
sick," he snapped. "Half the trouble in this town comes because you
can't learn to hold your tongues. You'd better learn. You're going to
pay for it if you don't, and don't you lose sight of that. Well, Brady,
what does this mean? What can I do for you?"

The ring of authority was in his voice again, as if he had called it
back by sheer will power. He had stepped forward alone, and stood
looking up at his guest, still framed in the sheltering trellis, and his
blurred eyes cleared and grew keen as he looked, regarding him
indifferently, like some refractory but mildly amusing animal. His
guest's defiant eyes avoided his, and the ineffective, swaying figure
seemed to shrink and droop and grow smaller, but it was a dignified
figure still and a dangerous one. There was the snarling menace of
impotent but inevitable rebellion about it, of men who fight on with
their backs against the wall; a menace that was not new born to-night,
but the gradual growth of years, just the number of years that the
Colonel had spent in Green River.

"I'm sorry, sir," stammered his guest.

"Then apologize and get out."

"I can't."

"I think you'll find you can, Brady."

"I can't. I've got to ask you a few questions."

They seemed to be slow in framing themselves. There was a little pause,
the kind of pause that for no apparent reason deprives you for the
moment of any desire to move or speak. The unassuming figure of the
young man under the trellis stood still, swaying only slightly from side
to side. A deprecating smile appeared on his lips, as if his errand were
distasteful to him and he wished to apologize for it. Gradually the
smile faded and the eyes grew steady again and unnaturally bright. He
held himself stiffly erect where he stood for a moment, took a few
lurching steps forward, paused, and then plunged suddenly across the
garden toward Colonel Everard.

It would have been hard to tell which came first, the little, stumbling
run forward, the Colonel's instinctive move to check it, the stampede
of the devotees of the time-honoured game of blind-man's buff, acting
now with a promptness and spontaneity which they had not displayed in
that game, Lillian Burr's hysterical scream, the snarling words from the
Colonel that silenced it, or the quick fla