Olga came a step towards him. She saw the gleam and took it for ridicule. The situation was intolerable. She would be mocked no longer.
"Dr. Wyndham," she said, her voice pitched rather low, "do you call yourself a gentleman?"
"I really don't know," he answered. "It's a question I've never asked myself."
"Because," she said, speaking rather quickly, "I think you a cad."
"Not really!" said Max, smiling openly. "Now I wonder why! Sit down, won't you, and tell me?"
The colour was fading from her face again. She had made a mistake in thus assailing him, and already she knew it. He only laughed at her puny efforts to hurt him, laughed and goaded her afresh.
"Why am I not a gentleman?" he asked, and drew in a mouthful of smoke which he puffed at the ceiling. "Because I said I should like to give you a whipping? But you would like to tar and feather me, I gather. Isn't that even more barbarous?" He watched the smoke ascend, with eyes screwed up, then, as she did not speak, looked down at her again.
She no longer stood in the sunlight, and the passing of the splendour seemed to have left her cold. She looked rather small and pinched—there was even a hint of forlornness about her. But she had learned her lesson.
As he looked at her, she clenched her hands, drew a deep breath, and spoke. "Dr. Wyndham, I beg your pardon for hurting you, and for being rude to you. I can't help my thoughts, of course, but I was wrong to put them into words. Please forget—all I've said!"
"Oh, I say!" said Max, opening his eyes, "that's the cruellest thing you've done yet. You've taken all the wind out of my sails, and left me stranded. What is one expected to say to an apology of that sort? It's outside my experience entirely."
Olga had turned to the door, but at his words she paused, looking back.
A glimmer of resentment still shone in her eyes.
"If I were in your place," she said, "I should apologize too."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," said Max. "Not if you wished to achieve the desired effect. You see, I've nothing to apologize for."
"How like a man!" exclaimed Olga.
"Yes, isn't it? Thanks for the compliment! Strange to say, I am much more like a man than anything else under the sun. I say, are you really going? Well, I forgive you for being naughty, if that's what you want. And I'm sorry I can't grovel to you, but I don't feel justified in so doing, and it would be very bad for you in any case. By the way—er—Miss Ratcliffe, I think you will be interested to learn that my visit to the Campions was of a social and not of a professional character. That was all you wanted to know, I think?"
Olga, holding the door open, looked across at him with surprise that turned almost instantly to half-scornful enlightenment.
"Oh, that's it, is it?" she said.
"That's it," said Max. "Quite sure you don't want to know anything else?"
Again he puffed the smoke upwards and watched it ascend.
"Why on earth couldn't you have said so before?" said Olga.
He turned at that and surveyed her quite seriously. "Oh, that was entirely for your sake," he said.
"For my sake!" said Olga. Sheer curiosity impelled her to remain and probe this mystery.
"Yes," said Max, with a sudden twinkle in his green eyes. "You know, it isn't good for little girls to know too much."
As the door banged upon her retreat, he leaned back, holding to the edge of the table, and laughed with his chin in the air.
Life in the country, notwithstanding its many drawbacks, was turning out to be more diverting than he had anticipated.
CHAPTER II
THE ALLY
"Ah, my dear, there you are! I was just wondering if I would come over and see you."
Violet Campion reined in her horse with a suddenness that made him chafe indignantly, and leaned from the saddle to greet Olga, who had just turned in at the Priory gates.
Olga was bicycling. She sprang from her machine, and reached up an impetuous hand, as regardless of the trampling animal as its rider.
"Pluto is in a tiresome mood to-day," remarked his mistress. "I know he won't be satisfied till he has had a good beating. Perhaps you will go on up to the house while I give him a lesson."
"Oh, don't beat him!" Olga pleaded. "He's only fresh."
"No, he isn't. He's vicious. He snapped at me before I mounted. It's no good postponing it. He'll have to have it." Violet spoke as if she were discussing the mechanism of a machine. "You go on up the drive, my dear, while I take him across the turf."
But Olga lingered. "Violet, really—I know he will throw you or bolt with you. I wish you wouldn't."
Violet's laugh had a ring of scorn. "My dear child, if I were afraid of that, I had better give up riding him altogether."
"I wish you would," said Olga. "He is much too strong for a woman to manage."
Violet laughed again, this time with sheer amusement, and then, with dark eyes that flashed in the sunlight, she slashed the animal's flank with her riding-whip. He uttered a snort that was like an exclamation of rage, and leaped clean off the ground. Striking it again, he reared, but received a stinging cut over the ears that brought him down. Then furiously he kicked and plunged, catching the whip all over his glossy body, till with a furious squeal he flung himself forward and galloped headlong away.
Olga stood on the drive and watched with lips slightly compressed. She knew that as an exhibition of skilled horsemanship the spectacle she had just witnessed was faultless; but it gave her no pleasure, and there was no admiration in the eyes that followed the distant galloping figure with the merciless whip that continued active as long as she could see it.
As horse and rider passed from sight beyond a clump of trees, she remounted her bicycle, and rode slowly towards the house.
Old and grey and weather-stained, the walls of Brethaven Priory shone in the hot sunlight. It had been built in Norman days a full mile and a half inland; but more than the mile had disappeared in the course of the crumbling centuries, and only a stretch of gleaming hillside now intervened between it and the sea. The wash and roar of the Channel and the crying of gulls swept over the grass-clad space as though already claim had been laid to the old grey building that had weathered so many gales. Undoubtedly the place was doomed. There was something eerily tragic about it even on that shining August afternoon, a shadow indefinable of which Olga had been conscious even in her childish days.
She looked over her shoulder several times as she rode in the direction in which her friend had disappeared, but she saw no sign of her. Finally, reaching the house, she went round to a shed at the back, in which she was accustomed to lodge her bicycle.
Here she was joined by an immense Irish wolf-hound, who came from the region of the stables to greet her.
She stopped to fondle him. She and Cork were old friends. As she finally returned to the carriage-drive in front of the house, he accompanied her.
The front door stood open, and she went in through its Gothic archway, glad to escape from the glare outside. The great hall she thus entered had been the chapel in the days of the monks, and it had the clammy atmosphere of a vault. Passing in from the brilliant sunshine, Olga felt actually cold.
It was dark also, the only light, besides that from the open door, proceeding from a stained-glass window at the farther end—a gruesome window representing