"Jake's away."
"Confound him! Just when he's wanted!" The ferocity died out of Saltash like the glow from cinders blown from a furnace. "Well, listen! I swear to you by all that is sacred that you're making a mistake. Sheila has told you a certain thing that is true, so far as it goes. But you've let your imagination run away with you. The rest is false."
He spoke with an emphasis that carried weight, and Bunny was moved in spite of himself. His own fire died down.
Saltash saw his advantage and pressed it. "If Jake were here, he'd tell you I was speaking the truth, and you'd believe him. You're on a wrong scent. So far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to follow it to blazes. I'm used to pleasantries of that sort from my friends. But I'm damned if I'll let that child be tripped for nothing. Do you hear, Bunny?" He shook the arm he gripped impatiently. "I'll see you in hell first!"
Bunny's mouth twisted with a painful effort to smile. "I'm in hell now," he said.
"Why the devil did you listen?" said Saltash. "Look here! We've got to have this thing out. Send a man along with my horse and walk across the park with me!"
He had gained his point by sheer insistence, and he knew it. Bunny knew it also and cursed himself for a weak fool as he moved to comply. With Saltash's blade through his heart, he yet could somehow find it possible to endure him.
He went with him in silence, hating the magnetism he found it impossible to resist. They passed through the shrubberies that skirted the house, and so to the open down.
Then in his sudden fashion, crudely and vehemently, Saltash began his defence.
"It's not my way," he said, "to give an answer to any man who questions; but you haven't stooped to question. So I tell you the truth. Sheila saw Toby working as a page at the Casino Hotel at Valrosa. That right? I thought so. It's the whole matter in a nutshell. I must have seen her too, but never noticed her till my last night in the place. Then I found Antonio hammering the poor little beggar out in the garden, and I stopped it. You'd have done the same. Afterwards, late that night, I went on board the yacht and found her down in the saloon—a stowaway. The yacht had started. I could have put back. I didn't. You wouldn't have done either. She took refuge with me. I sheltered her. She came to me as a boy. I treated her as such."