"I feel nothing–absolutely nothing," responded Britton, in a dull, passionless tone, and Ainsworth did not doubt him for a moment.
"Where is your man?" he asked after a second, in the same listless and unimpassioned voice.
"Here, in this room," Ainsworth answered, entering the billiard parlors. They skirted the tables and came where Morris stood with Trascott.
"Here is the man Morris," he announced in a measured manner. "Morris, this is Britton."
As Ainsworth spoke, he braced himself to guard against a hundred ugly possibilities which this meeting presented. He scanned the lineaments of the two men, alert to catch the nerve purpose dependent upon each one's expression, and in thus studying the features of Morris he lost sight of the latter's hands, which were thrust loosely in the pockets of his coat.
The husband's narrow eyes glittered; his lips were drawn back over his teeth in a wolfish snarl; all his capability for extreme hate seemed to be given free scope as he centred ferocious glances on the stony countenance of Rex Britton.
The other occupants of the room instinctively felt that the atmosphere held some vital and dramatic portent. They stopped their play and gazed wonderingly on the group over by the corner table.
There the two principal figures glared at each other without uttering a word, the one standing upright with set face and folded arms, the other crouching like a beast ready to spring in rage.
Ainsworth had never felt such a tense moment, even in his pleadings before tightly-packed courts of law. He was involuntarily forced to hold his breath in suspense, and a band of steel seemed to rim his chest. Trascott, with his habitual, comforting sanity, offered no speech. He recognized arbitration to be as futile as it was inconceivable. Things must run their course. Only he was ready, like Ainsworth, to guard against deadly violence following the outbreak.
For some moments Morris crouched and glared, a malicious quiver running through him. Then if any of the men had watched where his right hand was hidden they might have seen the cloth of the pocket poked forward by something cylindrical inside.