they had reached the side-entrance, he paused and opened it,
and then shoved his companion into an open field, where a number of
cows, fresh from the evening milking, regarded them with incurious eyes.
It was very quiet here, save for the occasional jangle of the cow-bells
and the far-off fifing of frogs in the marsh below.

"It would have been impossible, of course," said Colonel Musgrave, "for
me to have offered you any personal violence as long as you were, in a
manner, a guest of mine. This field, however, is the property of Judge
Willoughby, and here I feel at liberty to thrash you."

Then he thrashed the man who had annoyed Patricia Stapylton.

That thrashing was, in its way, a masterpiece. There was a certain
conscientiousness about it, a certain thoroughness of execution--a
certain plodding and painstaking carefulness, in a word, such as is
possible only to those who have spent years in guiding fat-witted
tourists among the antiquities of the Lichfield Historical Association.

"You ought to exercise more," Rudolph Musgrave admonished his victim,
when he had ended. "You are entirely too flabby now, you know. That path
yonder will take you to the hotel, where, I imagine, you are staying.
There is a train leaving Lichfield at six-fifteen, and if I were you, I
would be very careful not to miss that train. Good-evening. I am sorry
to have been compelled to thrash you, but I must admit I have enjoyed it
exceedingly."

Then he went back into the garden.

V

In the shadow of a white lilac-bush, Colonel Musgrave paused with an
awed face.

"Good Lord!" said he, aghast at the notion; "what would Agatha say if
she knew I had been fighting like a drunken truck-driver! Or, rather,
what would she refrain from saying! Only, she wouldn't believe it of me.
And, for the matter of that," Rudolph Musgrave continued, after a
moment's reflection, "I wouldn't have believed it of myself a week ago.
I think I am changing, somehow. A week ago I would have fetched in the
police and sworn out a warrant; and, if the weather had been as damp as
it is, I would have waited to put on my rubbers before I would have done
that much."

VI

He found her still in the summer-house, expectant of him, it seemed, her
lips parted, her eyes glowing. Rudolph Musgrave, looking down into twin
vivid depths, for a breathing-space, found time to rejoice that he had
refused to liken them to stars. Stars, forsooth!--and, pray, what paltr