“Exactly,” said Dicky. “And that’s why I decline to make use of this window except on the plain understanding.”
The butler cleared his throat again, even with a strange note of approval in the unseemly sound.
“Mayhap you’ll do,” he said. “Now go to bed, and don’t forgit your prayers in your disappyntment.”
Mr. Le Shore hissed-in a breath, as though the rain had suddenly become boiling spray, then tiptoed rigidly to his room.
The opening of the window, framed with creepers, whose shadows shrank or dilated softly in the muslin curtains, gave on to a soothful picture of lawn and herbaceous border which, withdrawing to cool caverns of leafiness under a remote cedar tree, seemed to gather themselves to a head of prettiest expression in the person of little Miss Mollinda swinging there in a hammock. Within, at the luncheon-table, Tregarthen poured himself out a glass of Madeira with a hand so limp and white in appearance that one would have thought it incapable of the task of poising the heavy decanter. Here was delicate seeming only, however. The perpetual sybarite reads an incorruptible constitution. The white hand held the bottle horizontal, as steady as a rock, during the minute the indolent, good-humoured eyes of its owner were directed to those of his visitor.
“My dear good Richard, the man is a burglar.”
He laughed at the other’s expression, filled his glass, sipped at it, and, hooking his thumbs in his arm-holes, lolled back in his chair.
“I am not justified in the confidence, perhaps. I don’t know. Anyhow, it is the short way out of a fatiguing explanation. The man is a burglar—not figuratively, but actually, by breeding, education, profession—appelez-le comme vous voudrez. He has the stamp of it so distinctly on him that one need not ask him to produce his skeleton key.”
“Then I have nothing more to say.”
“Ah! the devil take the honest thief! Your obvious grievance forces me to the explanation, after all. My dear boy, I imply nothing, argue from no premises but such as a long experience of this capital, troublesome fellow suggest to me. Speaking from these (I may be wrong), I should conclude that he is somehow in process of safeguarding, as he thinks, the interests of my girl, to whom he is quite romantically attached. Honestly, I don’t know to whom I would rather commit them. Poor motherless child!”