blazed.
"I'm sorry, Uvo----"
"I'll make you sorrier!" he hissed.
"I can't help it. You couldn't trust yourself in your fever. It's your own fault if I can't trust you now."
He glared at me like a caged tiger, and now I knew the wild sly look in his eyes. It was the look of the Kneller portrait at Hampton Court, but there was no time to think twice about that, with the tiger in him gnashing its teeth in very impotence.
"Oh, very well! You don't get out of this, with my property, if I can help it! I know I'm no match for you in brute strength, but you lay a finger on me if you dare!"
He was almost foaming at the mouth, and the trouble was that I could understand his frenzy perfectly. I would not have stood my own behaviour from any man, and yet I could not have behaved differently if I had tried, for his insensate fury was all of a piece with his delirious talk. I kept my eye on him as on a wild beast, and I saw his roving round the uncouth weapons on the wall. He was edging nearer to them; his hand was raised to pluck one down, his worn face bloated and distorted with his passion. Neither of us spoke; we were past the stage; but in the grate the gas fire burnt with a low reproving roar. And then all at once I saw Uvo turn his head as though his sensitive ear had caught some other sound; his raised hand swept down upon the handle of the door; and as he softly opened it, the other hand was raised in token of silence, and for one splendid second I looked into a face no longer possessed by the devil, but radiant with the keenest joy.
Then I was at his elbow, and our ears bent together at the open door. Gas was burning on the landing as well as in the hall below; everything seemed normal to every sense. I was obliged to breathe before another sound came from any quarter but that noisy stove in the room behind us. And then it was more a vibration of the floor, behind the curtains of the half-landing, than an actual sound. But that was enough; back we stole into Uvo's room.
"They've come," he whispered, simply. "They're in the bathroom--now!"
"I heard."
"We'll go for them!"
"Of course."
He reached down the very weapon he had meant for my skull a minute before. It was a great club, studded with brass-headed nails, and also a most murderous battle-axe, so that the same whirl might fell one foe and cleave another. I had taken it from Uvo, and his dancing eyes were thanking me as he loaded the revolver I had handed him in exchange.
There were three stairs down to the half-landing, but Uvo sat up too late at nights not to know the one that creaked. We reached the old maroon curtain without a sound; behind it was the housemaid's sink on the right, and straight in front the bathroom door with a faint light under it. But the light went out before we reached it, 

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