He stood in the entrance to the rose arbour, clutching at the trellis with one unsteady hand, and managing to keep fairly erect, a slightly built, swaying figure, black-haired and hatless. He kept one hand behind him, awkwardly, as a shy boy guards a favourite plaything. He was staring into the crowd in the garden as if he could see through into the heart of it, but had not the intellect just then to understand what he saw there.
It was the man Mrs. Randall had seen lurking in the shadow of the trees, but he was no mysterious stranger, though here in the light of the lanterns she hardly recognized him as she looked at his pale, excited face; it showed an excitement quite unaccounted for by the perfectly obvious fact that he was drunk, and entirely unconnected with that fact. Here and there on the outskirts of the crowd some one turned and saw him, too, and stared at him. They all knew him. He was Neil Donovan's cousin, the discredited young lawyer, Charlie Brady.
He did not speak or move. He only stood still and looked at them with vague, puzzled eyes, and lips that twitched as if he wanted to speak, but standing so, he had the centre of the stage. He could not command it, he had pushed his way into it doggedly, uncertain what to do first, but he was there. One by one his audience had become conscious of it, and were confronting him startled and uncertain, too. Young Chester Gaynor elbowed his way to the front, but stopped there, grinning at the invader, restrained perhaps by a lady's voice, which was to be heard admonishing him excitedly.
"Don't you get hurt, dear."
"How did he get here? Why can't somebody get him out?" other excited ladies inquired.
"Get Judge Saxon," directed Mr. J. Cleveland Kent's calm and authoritative voice.
"Get Sebastian. Where is the fellow? Is he afraid?" demanded the Honourable Joe from the extreme rear. Some one laughed hysterically. It was Mrs. Burr. The laugh was quickly hushed, but the new guest had heard it, though no other sound seemed to have impressed him. He laughed, too, a dry, broken ghost of a laugh, as cracked and strange as his voice, which he now found abruptly.
"Lillie," he called. "Hello, Lillie dear,"
Mrs. Burr was not heard to reply to this affectionate greeting, but he hardly paused for a reply. His light, high, curiously detached sounding voice talked on with a kind of uncanny fluency.
"Lillie," he urged cordially, "I heard you. I know you're there. Come out and let's have a look at you. I don't see anything of you lately. You're too grand for me. I don't care. I'm in love with a prettier girl. But you used to treat me all right, Lillie dear, and I treated you right, too. I never told. A gentleman don't tell. And you were straight with me. You never double-crossed me, like you and the dago Sebastian do to Everard. Everard! That's who I want to talk to. Where is he?"