Bunny uttered a shout of laughter that echoed and re-echoed up and down the winding stair.
"Is that what you would have done?"
"I'd have done one or the other," said Toby.
"By Jove, how bloodthirsty you sound!" ejaculated Bunny. "Are you in earnest by any chance?"
"Yes, I am in earnest." There was a note of bitter challenge in Toby's reply. "If a woman hasn't the spunk to defend herself, she's better dead."
"I agree with you there," said Bunny with decision. "But I don't know how you come to know it."
"Oh, I know a lot of things," said Toby's voice in the darkness, and this time it sounded oddly cold and desolate as if the stone walls around them had somehow deadened it.
He put out a hand and touched her, for she seemed in some fashion to have withdrawn from him, to have become remote as the echoes about them. "There are heaps of things you don't know anyway," he said. "You're only a kid after all."
"Think so?" said Toby.
She evaded his hand, flitting up before him towards that grim slit in the wall through which the dim half-light of the summer night vaguely entered. Her light figure became visible to him as she reached it. There came to him a swift memory of the butterfly-beauty that had so astounded him earlier in the evening.