De Stancy took the flask, and drank a little.
‘It warms, does it not?’ said Dare.
‘Too much,’ said De Stancy with misgiving. ‘I have been taken unawares. Why, it is three parts brandy, to my taste, you scamp!’
Dare put away the wine. ‘Now you are to see something,’ he said.
‘Something—what is it?’ Captain De Stancy regarded him with a puzzled look.
‘It is quite a curiosity, and really worth seeing. Now just look in here.’
The speaker advanced to the back of the building, and withdrew the wood billet from the wall.
‘Will, I believe you are up to some trick,’ said De Stancy, not, however, suspecting the actual truth in these unsuggestive circumstances, and with a comfortable resignation, produced by the potent liquor, which would have been comical to an outsider, but which, to one who had known the history and relationship of the two speakers, would have worn a sadder significance. ‘I am too big a fool about you to keep you down as I ought; that’s the fault of me, worse luck.’
He pressed the youth’s hand with a smile, went forward, and looked through the hole into the interior of the gymnasium. Dare withdrew to some little distance, and watched Captain De Stancy’s face, which presently began to assume an expression of interest.
What was the captain seeing? A sort of optical poem.