It enraged Barres to even think about it, but he could not bring himself to attach any darker significance to the incident than just that—a blackmailer, ready to display a gun, but not to use it, had come to bully a woman; had found himself unexpectedly trapped, and had behaved according to his kind.
Barres had meant to catch him. But he admitted to himself that he had gone about it very unskilfully. This added disgust to his smouldering wrath, but he realised that he ought to tell the story.
And after the rather subdued luncheon was ended, and everybody had gone out to the studio, he did tell it, deliberately including Dulcie in his audience, because he felt that she also ought to know.
“And this is the present state of affairs,” he concluded, lighting a cigarette and flinging one knee across the other, “——that my friend, Thessalie Dunois, who came here to escape the outrageous annoyance of a gang of blackmailers, is followed immediately and menaced with further insult on my very threshold.
“This thing must stop. It’s going to be stopped. And I suggest that we discuss the matter now and decide how it ought to be handled.”
After a silence, Westmore said:
“You had your nerve, Garry. I’m wondering what I might have done under the muzzle of that pistol.”
Dulcie’s grey eyes had never left Barres. He encountered her gaze now; smiled at its anxious intensity.
“I made a botch of it, Sweetness, didn’t I?” he said lightly. And, to Westmore: “The moment I suspected him he was aware of it. Then, when I tried to figure out how to get him into the studio, it was too late. I made a mess of it, that’s all. And it’s too bad, Thessa, that I haven’t more sense.”