Roddy, not to allow that the shock may have unhinged his mind
for a time? . . . No, I'm playing the humbug in _my_ turn, and I'll
own up. It was wicked, if you will: but it was great in its way, and
determined . . . and women, you know, always fall slaves to that sort
of thing. It was straightforward, too: Jimmy said Jack had given his
man fair warning. Jimmy--but you know that boy's way--gave me the
impression that he didn't condemn Jack's craze as unsportsmanlike:
merely for being, as he put it, a thought bloodthirstier than any
line of sport he himself felt any inclination to follow. 'But I'm no
judge, Con,' he added--I remember his words--'for the simple reason
that I never had a career to be ruined.' . . . Well, for the rest,
Jack says he came straight to you as soon as he set foot back in
England, and told you the whole story.--That's so, I guess?"
Constantia, in her agitation, relapsed into her mother's idiom.

I nodded, bending my head still lower over the high chimney-shelf,
still staring down into the fire.

"Then you _know_," she said; "and I _do_ call it rather dull of you,
Roddy--not to say insensate--and unlike you, anyway. . . . When, at
the end, he turned and behaved so finely, nursing this man through
his last illness. . . ."

I tell you, it was lucky that I still kept my face turned sideways,
still staring down on the fire. . . . It took me like a mental
nausea, and all my thought for the moment was to hold steady under
it. I felt my fingers gripping hard on the ledge and holding to it,
as the waves went over my poor brain. Through the surge of them
confusedly I heard her voice pleading: and yet her voice was calm,
well under control. It must have been the waves in my own head that
broke her speech into short sentences.

"You were his friend . . . his best friend . . . mine, too, Roddy.
You took it so well, just now . . . I _do_ want--"

What in the world could I say? How lift and turn my face to her?
How answer? . . . And yet within a second or two I must lift my face
and make some answer. Her voice was already trailing off
plaintively. I heard her catch her breath--

And then--thank God--I heard a brisk, happy footstep in the outer
passage, and Jimmy burst into the room with his accustomed whoop.

"Ahoy, within! How goes it with Gulliver?" He broke off, staring,
and let out another joyous whoop, upon which chimed the merry rattle
of tea-things, as Jephson followed close on his