"I wouldn't trust him," returned Gage with the firmness the other's remark lacked. "These Spaniards are the very deuce when they're jealous. They get simply mad. And nobody on this earth is safe from a loose madman if he takes it into his head to go for you. Our friend, the duke, meant business."
"Only so long as you interfere between him and Miss Buffkin," Peckover agreed.
"How was I to know what I was being let in for?" Gage exclaimed in an aggrieved tone. "When the old lady mentioned a foreign chap who'd been dancing after Ulrica I naturally thought it was some monkeyish fellow who'd squirm if you shook hands too hard, and would cry if you spoke to him unkindly. She never gave us a hint she'd got a bald Beelzebub with a voice that sends you the jumps and a homicidal history that gives you the shivers—to say nothing of that sickening revolver. Ugh! I can see the gleam of it now, as I've seen it all night. I was on the point of trying to get in first shot with a champagne bottle."
"Yes," Peckover admitted; "I've spent a pleasanter five minutes than when he was playing with the highly polished popper."
"Well, much more of this and I go back to plain Mr. Gage," that gentleman declared in a disgusted tone. "They talk of the fierce light that beats on royalty, but I didn't know the nobility lived in a set-piece of fire-works with occasional red-fire."
"They can't all of them do it," argued Peckover.
"They are all of 'em liable to it," Gage returned. "The squibs are there, only waiting for some little complication to come along and touch 'em off. It is getting on my nerves, and I'm wondering where the next little disturbance is coming from."
It seemed almost in answer to his thought that, just as he had voiced it, Bisgood announced that Lady Agatha Hemyock was in the drawing-room. Theirs was a late breakfast; still the call was early.
"That's where it's coming from," Peckover observed with an uneasy grin.
Lady Agatha was sympathetically troubled as she shook hands with them. Her preliminary business was to ask them down to the Moat to tea that afternoon; but as the men, exchanging significant glances, gladly accepted the invitation as affording an asylum from any immediate complications connected with the Duke of Salolja, they both felt that something more was coming, and of greater moment than a message which a note would have adequately conveyed. They were not long left in doubt.