“Look here, you know,” he said at last, and angrily; for he was enraged with himself for his want of words, “you come a good deal to Sir John’s.”
“Yes, I am invited,” said Alleyne, quietly.
Rolph’s rehearsal was gone.
“I’ll let him have it,” he muttered; “I’m not going to fence and spar. Yes,” he cried aloud, “I know you are. Sir John’s foolishly liberal in that way; but you know, Mr Allen, or Alleyne, or whatever your name is, I’m not blind.”
Alleyne remained silent; and, being now wound up, Rolph swaggered and straddled about with an imaginary horse between his legs.
“Look here, you know, I don’t want to be hard on a man who is ready to own that he is in the wrong, and apologises, and keeps out of the way for the future; but this sort of thing won’t do. By Jove, no, it sha’n’t do, you know. I won’t have it. Do you hear? I won’t have it.”
Something seemed to rise to Moray Alleyne’s throat—some vital force to run through his nerves and muscles, making them twitch and quiver, as the young officer went on in an increasingly bullying tone. For some moments Alleyne, of the calm, peaceful existence, did not realise what it meant—what this sensation was; but at last it forced itself upon him that it was the madness of anger, the fierce desire of a furious man to seize an enemy and struggle with him till he is beaten down, crushed beneath the feet.
As he realised all this he wondered and shrank within himself, gazing straight before him with knitted brows and half-closed eyes.
“You see,” continued Rolph, “I always have my eyes open—make a point of keeping my eyes open, and it’s time you understood that, because Miss—”
“Silence!” cried Alleyne fiercely. “What! What do you mean?” cried Rolph, as if he was addressing some delinquent in his regiment.