Leslie Chermside, following out of the dining-room, felt a prescience of coming peril for the beautiful speaker, and it was apart and separate from the plot in which he was to have taken such an ignoble part. From himself he knew that she would never have aught but loving fealty, and, so far as in him lay, protection. But in Nugent's words, uttered with such seeming carelessness, yet so well considered, there had, he could have sworn, sounded a note of menace, intended to be subtly conveyed to himself, that defeat was not admitted.
And the pity of it was that in a day or two at most he must fly from Ottermouth, unless he remained to be branded by that dirty little Jew as an impostor. In either case, his championship would be a sorry thing to stand between Violet Maynard and the fresh devices he feared were already hatching in Travers Nugent's cunning brain.
CHAPTER IV
NUGENT MOVES A PAWN
Mr. Nugent did not seek further private speech with Leslie Chermside while he remained at the Manor House. He acted in every respect as though he accepted the young man's renunciation as final, and after a saunter through the exquisite gardens with his host, asked that his car might be brought round. Having only reached Ottermouth the previous evening, he explained there were many things that claimed his attention at home.
"All right, dear boy," said Montague Maynard in his loud jolly voice. "Run out and see us whenever you can tear yourself away from golf and the delights of the Ottermouth Club. Old Sarah Dymmock hates you like the devil, but she don't bite so long as people don't want to hurt my little Violet, and she's a good sportswoman. And you're too good a sportsman yourself to mind an old woman's whims."
"I thoroughly understand Miss Dymmock, and I have the most profound regard for her," responded Nugent cordially. "There is never likely to be any serious matter at issue between us, but if there were I should be very sorry to have to cross swords with her."
Yet his thin lips curled in a dreamy smile as he was whirled away in the serviceable little Darracq which had been presented to him by a titled idiot in gratitude for an introduction that had eventually ruined him.
"I hardly think that Miss Sarah Dymmock, useful as she has proved this morning, will loom on the horizon of present interests," he murmured softly to himself when he had directed his chauffeur to drive him home.