Later that evening he went to the door of the dressing-room of 72 and knocked quietly.
There was no answer. He entered and laid the roses on the table.
As he did so the door between the two rooms opened, and Ruth stood in it, watching him with hostile eyes.
In the room behind her Ernie could see the Captain in his smoking-jacket before the fire with a cigarette between his lips. Then the Captain saw him too. His easy expression changed in a flash; and he acted as always without a moment's hesitation.
He strode towards the open door between the two rooms, brushing Ruth almost rudely aside.
"Now no more of it!" he said with brutal savagery. "I've had enough!"
There was no light in the dressing-room but that which came through the uncurtained window from the moonlit sea, and the beam from the bed-room.
In the dimness the eyes of the two men clashed.
For a second the habit of discipline, of inferiority, of bowing to the other's artificially imposed authority, overwhelmed Ernie and he wavered. Then strength came to him like a tidal wave: he steadied and stood his ground.
In the eyes of his enemy he recognized in a flash the Eternal Brute, domineering, all-devouring, ruthless in the greed of its unbridled egotism, whose familiar features had been stamped indelibly, from the beginnings of Time, upon the retentive tablets of his race-memory.