A single quiet footfall sounded on the porch and the door-bell pealed. In the silence that followed, the noise of the turning of locks and the drawing of bolts was distinctly audible in the study.
"Damn you!" cried Stanhope, pale with the sudden white-hot passion of the unstable. "This is your doing—you—you masquerader!"
The two men stood facing each other, hardly a yard apart. They were almost exactly of a figure, Stanhope being if anything a shade the taller. Each was conscious as he regarded the other that he might be looking at himself, intangibly altered, in a mirror; and the fancy was pleasing to neither.
"I suppose I might as reasonably call you that," said Varney quietly. "I might as reasonably say that this knock on the head from Sam Orrick was your doing. The fact is that you were a fool to come back here. But as for those poor fellows out there—"
The door-bell rang again, insistently, and he broke off. A window upstairs rattled open, and they heard a man's steady voice:
"'I there on the piazza! What do you want?"
"I want to see Mr. Stanhope a minute," called a thicker voice from below. "On important business."
"'E's not 'ere," said faithful Henry. "'E's expected to arrive to-morrow."
"You're a —— —— liar!"
Immediately a general yelling arose, from farther back in the darkness.
Diplomacy, it seemed, was about to be abandoned for immediate action.
But over the sudden hubbub, that cool voice at the window rang out
again: