"Certainly is real wonderful, Miss Babs," Higgins was exclaiming. "Real wonderful!"
He gave Toory a few more orders while Babs listened, and Toory responded dutifully. But it all seemed wrong. Toory was glad when Higgins lighted another cigarette and wandered on; and then presently Toory was leading the girl home around the base of the rocky hill in the familiar way he knew so well.
It was Toory's last task for the day, and nightfall found him quiescent again in the hall niche. A storm was in the making, so that there were more little noises than usual, especially after midnight when his hearing became sharpened. At monotonous intervals the big clock chimed, but soon after midnight the voice-murmurs in the house died away.
Then they started again and it made Toory's eye-beams shift and his head cock a little sidewise as he listened. The voices were familiar and he knew it was Higgins and his wife whispering together in the east wing.
"Oh Gil, be careful."
"Sure I will. I can handle that blarsted thing now. I gave it lots of orders this afternoon."
The murmurs blurred into the wind under the eaves. The night had been mostly cloudy, Toory knew, because no moonlight showed at the windows. But there was a little moonlight there now. Toory stood in his hall niche, watching it. Presently he could hear faint distant footsteps, a familiar tread, and he knew that Higgins was coming softly down through the house.
It was so new a thing that a queer, sharp jangling sprang up in Toory. He was on guard-command, ready to give an alarm-call if the need came. He remembered his guard-command training, the surprise tests in the night, the whispers of two strange men outside a window he'd been guarding.
It had been easy to give the alarm-call then. But surely this was different. It was so hard, trying to understand. Somehow it seemed that now there were things in his memory—things he had seen and heard—that ought to fit together like little widely scattered parts of a difficult order. You had to understand all the parts. He wanted very much to understand, because when he didn't, he made mistakes. It had seemed easy during his training. He wondered why Higgins was giving him parts so much harder to fit together than anything he had ever tried to understand before.
The faint sound of Higgins' tread was growing louder. Toory's gaze clung alertly to the staircase as he waited. Presently Higgins was at the top, and coming quietly, swiftly down the padded steps. He was wrapped in a greatcoat with a dark hat on his head.