“I dislike this man Milbank very much, Winfield. I think Ruth sees too much of him.”
Kirk stiffened. His eyebrows rose the fraction of an inch.
“Oh?” he said.
It seemed to Bailey for an instant that he had been talking all his life to people who raised their eyebrows and said “Oh!” but he continued manfully.
“I do not think that Ruth should know him, Winfield.”
“Wouldn’t Ruth be rather a good judge of that?”
His tone nettled Bailey, but the man conscious of doing his duty acquires an artificial thickness of skin, and he controlled himself. But he had lost that feeling of friendliness, of sympathy with a brother in misfortune which he had brought in with him.
“I disagree with you entirely,” he said.
“Another thing,” went on Kirk. “If this man Milbank—I still can’t place him—is such a thug, or whatever it is that he happens to be, how did he come to be at your house the night you say I met him?”
Bailey winced. He wished the world was not perpetually reminding him that Basil and Sybil were on speaking terms.