"Stop that, Jesse!" broke in Scammel, raising an authoritative arm, a trace of anger in his tone. "Good God, man, can't you play the game? You've got a man's gizzard, haven't you? What the devil are you trembling and quaking about? Is your case so bad as all that? Go ahead, Blythe. It's your say now, and we're listening."
Jesse, knowing that the verdict of this court of arbitration could not but be against him, glanced at the portieres as if upon the point of bolting for it. Scammel, noticing this, passed behind Jesse and took his stand at the parting of the portieres. The two younger men rose from their straddled chairs and viewed the proceedings standing, their eyes slitting perceptibly when they perceived Jesse's manifest cravenness.
"Gentlemen," said Blythe, glancing from Scammel to the younger men and not even seeming to see Jesse, "I don't think it will be necessary to pledge you to secrecy as to what happens here, even if no names are to be mentioned. If the affair involved a man it would be different. But it does not. It involves a young New York lady, now in London, who has been out of school less than half a year. The young lady is my ward. Moreover, she is to be my wife."
"But I didn't know that!" broke in Jesse with a hideous shrillness of tone. "I swear to God that I did not know that, or——"
Scammel glared Jesse into silence, and Blythe went on.
"It makes no difference, as you will discover, whether he knew it or not," he said, speaking of Jesse as if he had not been present. "The thing that he did, in this place, a week ago, was a thing so incredibly base that my account of it might well tax your credulity. But that it happened precisely as I am going to tell it to you is of course true, else I should not be here. The young New York lady of whom I speak is in London under the protection of a chaperon, a friend of her mother's. A week ago, by means of a trick, this man enticed my ward, who is wholly lacking in experience, to this house. He caused a telephone message to be sent to her at her hotel, informing her that her chaperon, who had left the hotel on a shopping tour, had been overtaken by an illness and had been brought to this house. This house was represented in the telephone message to be the home of a 'Mrs. Hammond,' an imaginary friend of my ward's chaperon. The young lady came here with all haste to see, as she supposed, her chaperon and protectress. This man, waiting for her, not only insulted her grossly, subjecting her to indignities and physical violence which I can scarcely speak of in the presence of gentlemen, but he told her, virtually in so many words, that it was his deliberate purpose to deflower her. His own valet, a Japanese, appeared in her moment of peril; and it was the valet's physical intervention alone that saved her from the fate this man had ingeniously and malignantly planned for her."
Blythe paused. He had spoken quietly, but there was a menacing timbre in his voice. Jesse, looking like a hunted animal, had attempted several times to break in upon Blythe's recital, but each time Scammel had stopped him with a warning gesture.
Now Scammel, with gathered brows, stepped in front of Jesse and inquired of him:
"What have you to say to this, Jesse?"
"I didn't know, I tell you," Jesse broke out in a voice that was choked with terror, "that she was to be married to Blythe, or——"