Johnson Boller dashed the sweat of fury from his eyes.
"I come to stay with you, when Beatrice goes," he said tremblingly. "And although there's no woman in this flat ordinarily, a woman's here last night——"
"Stop there!" Anthony Fry cried savagely. "Do you mean that I brought this woman here deliberately? Do you mean that I knew?"
"Knew!" Johnson Boller jeered.
"Then I tell you that you're an infernal ass, sir, and I decline to defend myself!" Anthony snarled fiercely. "You! You lovesick fool and your crazy imagination! You're too much in love to reason, but—what about me?"
"Well, what about you?" Johnson Boller sneered.
"I," said Anthony, "have borne the reputation of a decent man! No women have ever been in this apartment before, save one or two relatives! No woman of any description has ever passed the night here before. And yet now, when this infernal thing has happened, your poor addled wits—oh, bah! Bah, sir!"
"Don't bah at me!" Mr. Boller said dangerously, although not quite so dangerously, because Anthony's emotion had carried its own conviction.
Then, for a little, these two old friends stood and trembled and glared at each other, Johnson Boller contemplating a swift and terrible uppercut to Anthony's lean jaw, which should stretch him unconscious perhaps for hours—Anthony meanwhile wondering superheatedly whether, once his long fingers had wound about Johnson Boller's plump throat, he could hold on until wretched life was extinct.
They were angry, terribly angry and almost for the first time in their lives, and had they stood and glared for another fifteen seconds it is possible that one or the other might have ended his days in Sing Sing's electric chair—but as it happened Mary's voice came upon the vibrating, pregnant air, clear and cool and full of warranted acerbity.