Dan drew himself up with a short laugh, half bitter and half triumphant.
"Rag, is it? Take care what you're saying, Mr. Sto'll, Sir. You may be a big man in the island now, but there's them that's bigger and that's the people."
Stowell pointed with a quivering hand to the clock on the landing, and said,
"Look at that clock. If you're not out of this house in one minute...."
Dan's laugh rose to a cry of derision.
"So that's it, is it? That's what the first Justice of the Peace in the Isle of Man is, eh? Son of the ould Dempster too! The grand ould holy saint as they're...."
But before he could finish, Stowell, with a shout that drowned Dan's laugh as if it had been the whimper of a baby girl, laid hold of the man by the collar of his coat and the slack of his trousers and flung him out of the open door and clashed it after him.
Dan, who had rolled and tossed and bumped on the path like a fat hogshead kecked from the tail of a cart, picked himself up and went staggering down the drive, shaking his fist at the house and pouring his maledictions upon it in a voice that was like the broken howl of a limping dog.
Janet came running from her room, and seeing Stowell with his eyes aflame and panting for breath, said,
"Oh dear! Oh dear! Now you'll be worse."