ice:

"Hey, Blenham! Oh, Blenham! On the jump. Packard wants you!"

The door slammed behind him. His back once turned on "m'lord," Guy
Little did not wait to get out of earshot to become less butler than
human sparrow.

Blenham needed but the one summons and that might almost have been
whispered. He was fidgeting in his own room, waiting for this moment,
knowing that he was to receive definite instructions concerning Stephen
Packard. Over his right eye was a patch; his face was still a sickly
pallor; his one good eye burned with a sullen flame which never went
out.

Guy Little was the one human being in the world with whom the old man
talked freely, to whom he unburdened himself. With his chief
lieutenant Blenham he was, as with other men, short, crisp-worded,
curt. Now, seeming to take no stock of Blenham's disfigurement, in a
dozen snapping sentences he issued his orders.

Their gist was plain. Blenham was to go the limit to accomplish two
purposes: the minor one of making the world a dreary place for certain
scoundrels, name of Temple; the major one of utterly breaking Steve
Packard. When Blenham went out and to his own room again the sullen
fire in his good eye burned more brightly, as though with fresh fuel.

A little later Guy Little returned, lighted the lamps, made a small
fire in the big fireplace, and ignoring the presence of his master,
went to stand in front of the high book-shelves. After a long time he
got the step-ladder and placed it, climbed to the top, and squatted
there in front of his favorite section. Ultimately he drew down a
volume with many colored illustrations; it was a tale of love, its
_mise en scene_ the mansions of the lords and ladies whose adventures
occurred in that atmosphere of romance which had captivated the soul of
Guy Little.

When he climbed down and sought the big chair in which he would curl up
to read and chew countless sticks of gum, chewing fast when the action
hurried, slowly when there was the dramatic pause, stopping often with
mouth wide open when tense and breathless interest held him, he
discovered that the old man had gone out.

Guy Little pursed his lips. Then he went to the recently vacated
leather chair. Not to sit in it; merely to draw out the little volume
from under the cushion.

"'Lyrics from Tennyson,'" he read aloud. "What the devil are them
things?"

He turned the pages.

"Pomes!" he grunted in disgust.

Whereupon he carried hi