Ainsworth shook his billiard-cue with unmistakable emphasis in the stranger's face.
"Get out," he cried irascibly. "You're drunk, and I don't want to talk to you!" He pushed his annoyer rudely away, but the latter returned to the attack, whereupon Bertrand Trascott intervened.
"Have patience, Cyril," he begged. "The man evidently has a reason for his persistence. Now, sir, what is it? We would like to go on with our game."
The stranger who had circled in to the corner-table in the billiard-room of the great hotel and stopped their play presented an uninviting and ludicrous appearance.
His head and shoulders reminded Trascott of those of a dissipated Austrian virtuoso whom he knew well and whose brilliance had become very spasmodic on account of relapses to the same vice which apparently ruled the stranger. The resemblance was quite close, embodying the uncontrolled, tremulous chin and lips surmounted by a fiercely-curled wisp of moustache, the hawked nose, narrowed eyes and prominent, bony cheeks, with a pair of puttied ears sprouting from his hair like old mushrooms in the grass, while a pinched, sunken neck failed to fill his peaked shoulders.
Trascott thought that if both the Austrian virtuoso and the portly butler who had come to be looked on as an institution at Britton Hall were cut in two, and the upper half of the virtuoso pieced to the lower, corpulent section of the Honorable Oliver's servant the result would be the prototype of the stranger who had undertaken to tack among the billiard-tables.
"What do you want?" he asked the man, with more severity.
The questioned one surveyed Trascott for a space, recognized his curate's cloth and decided he had no business with him, for his eyes flashed aggressively upon the lawyer, who was again preparing for the execution of the stroke that the man had spoiled.
Ainsworth's back was turned, so the intruder jogged his right elbow for attention with the result that the lawyer's ball, deflected at right angles, leaped across the next table and spread confusion among a group of Frenchmen playing there.
This second interruption of the stringing of a long break and the titter of idle observers, combined with the French stares of contempt, was not at all conducive to the regaining of Ainsworth's equanimity.