"Yes? What is it that you wish?"
The tall stranger was observed to bow slightly.
"As I say, I beg the favor of speaking to Miss Heth a few moments--privately. Of course I shouldn't venture to trespass so, if the matter weren't vitally important--"
"Who are you?" demanded the great young man with rather more impatience than seemed necessary. "And what do you wish to speak to her about? Speak plainly, I beg, and be brief!"
The two men stood facing each other in the faint light. Ten feet of summer-house floor was between them, yet something in their position was indefinably suggestive of a conflict.
"I should explain," said the intruder, dim in the doorway, "that I come as a friend of poor Dalhousie--the boy who got into all the trouble ... Ah...."
The involuntary ejaculation, briefly arresting his speech, was his perfect tribute to the girl's beauty now suddenly revealed to him. For Carlisle had unconsciously leaned forward out of the shadows of the bench just then, a cold hand laid along her heart.
"This afternoon," the man recovered, with a somewhat embarrassed rush. "I--I appreciate, I needn't say, that it seems a great liberty, to--"
"Liberty is scarcely the word," said Hugo Canning, fighting the lady's battle with lordly assurance. "Miss Heth declines to hear...."
But the stranger's vivid voice bore him down: "Do you, Miss Heth?... The situation is terribly serious, you see. I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily, but--I--I'm afraid he may take matters into his own hands--"