"That's all right, old chap! Lie still for a while. I'll be up in a few minutes to help you undress."
Standish was hurrying from the room and closing the door behind him, even as he spoke. With the last word the door shut and Gavin could hear the big man's footsteps hastening along the upper hall toward the stair-head.
Brice gave him a bare thirty seconds' start. Then, rising with strange energy for so dazed and broken an invalid, he left the room and followed him toward the head of the stairs. His light footfall was soundless on the matting as he went.
He reached the top of the stairs just as Milo arrived at the bottom. Claire was standing in the veranda doorway shading her eyes and peering out into the darkness. But at sound of her brother's advancing tread she turned and ran back to him, meeting him as he reached the bottom of the stair and clasping both hands anxiously about his big forearm.
She seemed about to break out in excited, even frightened speech, when chancing to raise her eyes, she saw Gavin Brice calmly descending from the hall above. At sight of him her eyes dilated. Milo had begun to speak. She put one hand warningly across her brother's bearded mouth. At the same moment Gavin, halting midway on the stairs, said with deprecatory meekness:
"You didn't tell me what time to be ready for breakfast. I'd hate to be late and—"
He got no further. Nor did he seek to. His ears had been straining to make certain of the ever approaching sound of footsteps across the lawn. Now an impatient tread echoed on the veranda, and a man's figure blocked the doorway.
The newcomer was slender, graceful, with the form of an athletic boy rather than of a mature man. He was pallid and black eyed. His face had a classic beauty which, on second glance, was marred by an almost snakelike aspect of the small black eyes and a sinister smile which seemed to hover eternally around the thin lips. His whole bearing suggested something serpentine in its grace and a smoothly half-jesting deadliness.
So much the first glimpse told Brice as he stood there on the stairs and surveyed the doorway. The second look showed him the man was clad in a strikingly ornate yachting costume. Gavin's mind, ever taught to dissect trifles, noted that in spite of his yachtsman-garb the stranger's face was untanned, and that his long slender hands with their supersensitive fingers were as white and well-cared-for as a woman's.
Yachting, in Florida waters at any time of year, means either a thick coat of tan or an exaggerated sunburn. This yachtsman had neither.