'Come out of that!'
'What's the matter?' Dick's voice did not sound as unconcerned as he would have wished.
'You come out!'
'No need to speak like that,' and Dick emerged. He thought it wise to ignore Archie. 'Hallo, Norah,' he said. 'Why didn't you wait at the camp?'
The assumption of ownership was ill-timed. Archie's sunburnt face went brick red, and he came very close to Dick.
'If you don't clear out, I'll break you up.'
Dick Ward towered above his adversary, but there his advantage ended. He carried too much flesh, and his splendid torso looked best under a tennis shirt. But Archie's muscles had been worked into steel by twenty-five-mile days after elephant, and made him as awkward an opponent as a six-inch shell.
'My dear Sinclair,' said Dick, 'we must talk this over like men of the world.' The tone of patronage alone would have been enough. Archie's feet shifted and his right knee turned and bent for the upper-cut that in another second would have smashed upwards under Dick's jaw, when Norah's low voice broke in:—
'Archie! Dick! Don't; you're making things worse!'
Her instinct was to save her lover. He was in danger, he was her lover. The pity she had lately felt for Archie was in a way disloyalty to Dick.