She felt motherly towards him. He was so pathetically foolish that she felt sorry for him.

    "I'll go when I want to," he said. "If you want me thrown out, call your father. Why don't you? Call the servants he fired! You think I'm being a cad, but I'm underlining and italicising the fact that you arc alone, not in this house, but in the world."

    She had found her strength and her weapon.

    "And you are being the strong, talkative man. The silent variety was sure to produce his opposite sooner or later," she said.

    She leant against the back of a chair, her hands behind her. Her poise was disconcerting to this stormer of citadels. Neither hectic defiance nor surrender met him, but the consciousness that there was some hidden reserve. He felt it coming and was uneasy.

    "I'm not frantically annoyed by your—I am trying to think of a good description—tragic clowning; clowning because it was intended to be tragic. I don't want to marry you, Arthur, because—well, you admitted that of yourself you have no particular quality or charm, didn't you? You must 'get me' by virtue of your better financial position. That is snobbish in you, isn't it? Or by blackmail, or some other thing. The villain in the melodrama does that. You should have had a green limelight focused on you—the strong, talkative man and the weak, silent woman. That would be novel, wouldn't it? You are the second drunken man I have met today, only you have swallowed a more potent intoxicant. You're vanity-drunk, and you'll find it hard to get sober again."

    Her voice never lost its command of him. He writhed, made grunting little noises. Once he tried to break in on her, but in the end he was beaten down, and arrested the employment of arguments which he had so carefully thought out in a shrinking fear that they would sound silly even to himself. She crossed to the door and opened it.

    "I only want to say—" he began, and she laughed.

    "You still want to say something?" she asked. He walked out without a word and she crossed and locked the door, behind him.

    She stood with one hand on the knob, thinking, her head bent low in the attitude of one who was listening. But she was only thinking, and still in thought she put out the lights and went upstairs to her room. It was very early to go to bed, but there was no reason why she should stay below. She undressed slowly by the light of the moon. Her room was on the top floor, on the same level as that of the servants. It was the gable window which Andrew Macleod had seen, and she chose it because it gave her a view uninterrupted by the trees.

    She pulled a dressing-gown over her pyjamas and, throwing open the casement windows, leant her elbows on the edge and looked out. The world was a place of misty hues. The light flooding the central green turned the grass to a dove grey. The beams caught the white scar of old Beverley Quarry, and it showed like a big oyster-shell against the wooded slope of the hill. A night of peace; no sound but the faint screech of an owl from the hills and the crunching of feet on the gravel road. Tramp, tramp, tramp, like the measured march of a soldier. Who was abroad? She did not recognise the leisurely footstep. Then he came into view.

    Looking down between the branches of two trees, she saw a man, and knew him before he turned his face inquiringly towards the house.

    The detective with the grey eyes—Andrew Macleod!

    She bit her lip to check the cry that rose, and, stepping back, closed the windows stealthily.

    Her heart was thumping painfully; she almost heard the 'Ugh!'of it.

    The detective! She crept to the windows and looked out, and, waiting, she pulled them open.