, I'll tell you exactly what happened last night."

I made a fairly long story of it; so long that we reached the lodge at the
Park gates before I had finished, and turned back again up the avenue. I
was careful to be scrupulously truthful, but I gave him no record of any
conversation that I thought might, however indirectly, inculpate Banks.

Jervaise did not once interrupt me, but I saw that he was listening with
all his attention, studying my statement as he might have studied a
complicated brief. And when I had done, he thrust out his ugly underlip
with an effect of sneering incredulity that I found almost unendurably
irritating.

"Do you mean to say that you don't believe me?" I asked passionately.

We were just opposite the side road that I had taken the night before, the
road that led through the thickest part of the spinney before it came out
into the open within a quarter of a mile of Jervaise Clump. And as if both
our minds had been unconsciously occupied with the same thought, the need
for a still greater privacy, we turned out of the avenue with an air of
deliberate intention and a marked increase of pace. It seemed as though
this secluded alley had, from the outset, been the secret destination of
our walk.

He did not reply to my challenging question for perhaps a couple of
minutes. We were walking quite quickly, now. Until the heat of our rising
anger could find some other expression, we had to seek relief in physical
action. I had no doubt that Jervaise in his own more restrained way was as
angry as I was myself. His sardonic sneer had intensified until it took
the shape of a fierce, brooding anger.

We were out of sight of the junction of the side road with the avenue,
when he stopped suddenly and faced me. He had manifestly gathered himself
together for a great effort that was, as it were, focussed in the
malignant, dominating scowl of his forbidding face. The restraint of his
language added to the combined effect--consciously studied, no doubt--of
coarse and brutal authority.

"And why did you spy on me this morning?" he asked. "Why did you follow me
up to the Home Farm, watch me while I was talking to Miss Banks, and then
slink away again?"

I have two failings that would certainly have disqualified me if I had
ever attempted to adopt the legal profession. The first is a tendency to
blush violently on occasion. The second is to see and to sympathise with
my opponent's point of view. Both these