EVE BRIDGES A DIFFICULT SITUATION BY INTRODUCING LANYARD AS "MY FRIEND MR. ANTHONY."
The disturbance below by this time had attained the proportions of a small riot. There were scuffling feet on the stairs. Nearer at hand Folly was screaming. To this Mallison added the snarl with which, recovering, he took the offensive in turn, launching himself at his assailant's throat in murderous fury. Unhappily enough for him, Lanyard had wanted nothing better. They closed, grappled, for a breath swayed as one. Then Mallison felt one of his arms being irresistibly wrenched out of its socket, and to such exquisite torture yielded, perforce turning his back to Lanyard, who held him so another instant, then without warning released him.
With the racket of argument, physical and vocal, now loud upon the very landing outside, Lanyard dared not be merciful or give Mallison any fighting chance. As the man whirled round to launch a new onslaught, Lanyard's fist carried every ounce of his weight and all his ill-will to the other's jaw. Lifted bodily by that terrific blow, Mallison crashed back across an occasional table, sweeping off and extinguishing a lamp, and collapsed, insensible, on the floor.
Simultaneously the door flung open and four people broke into the boudoir, a struggling knot that instantly resolved itself into its elements; the McFee butler, with coat half torn from his back, two strange men, one of rough-and-ready appearance, the other a type slightly more genteel, and a woman, a garish blonde of the synthetic school, with her hat over one ear.
The shaded light on the secretary alone remained to lend these several actors visibility. Lanyard stood squarely in front of it, his figure, to eyes new from the stronger illumination of the hall, hardly better than a silhouette. Folly, well out of harm's way on his one hand, was less kindly shadowed, in view of the extreme candour of her déshabillé; Mallison, on the other, was screened from the invaders by the drop-leaf of the table behind which he had gone down.
Thus chance set the stage and lighted it for a twist in the action of the piece unforseen even by its first player and collaborating dramatist. For the bottle-made blonde with hat askew needed only a glimpse of that tall, slender, and well-poised shape, bulking black against the glow, to hurl herself across the room, fall weeping upon Lanyard's bosom, and strain him passionately to the agitated abundance of her own.
"My husband!" she cried—"my husband! O Harry! how could you?"
And Lanyard suffered her.