"Come in, Ivan."

The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil
O'Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.

The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.
"What do you want with me?" he cried.

"Please sit down," said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. "Why, you
aren't wearing your sword. Where is it?"

"I left it on the library table," said O'Brien, his brogue deepening in
his disturbed mood. "It was a nuisance, it was getting--"

"Ivan," said Valentin, "please go and get the Commandant's sword from
the library." Then, as the servant vanished, "Lord Galloway says he saw
you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you
doing in the garden?"

The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. "Oh," he cried in
pure Irish, "admirin' the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy."

A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that
trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel
scabbard. "This is all I can find," he said.

"Put it on the table," said Valentin, without looking up.

There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman
silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess's weak
exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway's swollen hatred was
satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.

"I think I can tell you," cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering
voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. "I can tell you
what Mr. O'Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to
silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family
circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little
angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,"
she added, with rather a wan smile, "if he will care at all for it now.
For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing
like this."

Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in
what he imagined to be an undertone. "Hold your tongue, Maggie," he said
in a thunderous whisper. "Why should you shield the fellow? Where's his
sword? Where's his confounded cavalry--"

He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was
regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole
group.

"You old fool!" she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, "what