"I'm your friend," repeated Mr. Burr, generously if irrelevantly, and this time without effect. His client had crossed the room without another glance at him, and had his hand on the knob of the Judge's office door. His manner still had the composure which Mr. Burr had advocated, but his face was very pale, ominously pale, and his brown eyes were changed and bright, dangerously bright. To imaginative eyes like Mr. Burr's he must have looked suddenly taller.
Mr. Burr was facing an unmistakable crisis, with no time to wonder how long it had been forming, or why. He hurried after the boy and caught him fiercely if ineffectively by the arm.
"You can't go in there," stated Mr. Burr arbitrarily, all logic deserting him. "You can't. You don't know——"
"Oh, I'm not going to knife the Judge," his client explained kindly. "I'm only going to find out what's back of this."
"Take it quietly," was the ill-chosen sentiment which suggested itself to Mr. Burr. Neil Donovan swung round angrily, and paused to reply to it, with fires which the somewhat negative though offensive personality of the pink young man could never have kindled alight in his brown eyes.
"Quietly? There's been too much of that in this town. I'm sick of it. The only friend I've got who hasn't got one foot in the gutter goes back on me for no reason at all, the first time I ask a favour of him that don't amount to picking his pockets. The only big man in this rotten town who's halfway straight since Everard turned the town rotten begins to act like he wasn't straight. What's back of it? I'm going to know. Get out of my way, Theodore."
"You don't know who's in there."
"I don't care. I'm going to know." Disposing of the hovering and anxious intervention of Mr. Burr, and throwing the door open, he slammed it in the pink young man's perturbed face, and stepped alone out of the sunshine into the Judge's dim little inner office.
The Judge's friendly littered little room was not so inviting in working hours as it was in the hospitable hours of late afternoon. It was like a woman seen in evening dress by daylight. But the boy who had invaded it so hotly unmasked no conspiracy here. The men at the table near the one window, with a pile of official but entirely innocent looking papers between them, had every right to be there. They were the Judge and Colonel Everard.
The great man looked quite undisturbed by the boy's invasion, glancing up at him indifferently from the papers that he was turning over with his finely moulded, delicately used hands; he even looked mildly amused, but the boy turned to him first instinctively, and not to the Judge, who was peering at him with troubled and kindly eyes over the top of his glasses.