Armathwaite moistened his lips with his tongue.

"You enlightened her ignorance, I presume?" he inquired blandly.

"I didn't know what she was gettin' at, but I asked her plump and plain who the 'Stephen Garth' was who hanged himself in this very house, and has his name and the date of his death on the stone over his grave.... It strikes me that even you don't know the facts, Mr. Armathwaite. If her father is alive, who was the man who committed suicide?... And, by jing, did he commit suicide?"

James Walker's theorizing ended suddenly.

"You poisonous little rat!" murmured Armathwaite, and seized him. Walker was young and active, and by no means a weakling or cowardly, but he resembled a jackal in the grip of a tiger when the hands closed on him which had choked the life out of Nas'r-ulla Khan, chief cut-throat of the Usman Khel. There was no struggle. He was flung face downwards on the table until the door was thrown wide. Then he was bundled neck and crop out of the house, and kicked along the twenty yards of curving path to the gate.

There Armathwaite released him, a limp and profane object.

"Now, go to Nuttonby, and stop there!" was the parting injunction he received. His bitterest humiliation lay in the knowledge that Marguérite Garth and Betty Jackson, hearing the racket, had rushed to hall and door, and were gloating over his discomfiture. A drop of bitterest gall was added by his assailant's subsequent behavior, for Armathwaite turned his back on him, and sauntered slowly to the house, seemingly quite assured that there would be no counter-attack. And, indeed, James Walker retained sufficient sense in his frenzied brain to realize that he had no earthly chance in a physical struggle with this demon of a man. So he climbed into the dog-cart, though not with his wonted agility, and drove away to Nuttonby without ever a backward glance.

But he vowed vengeance, vowed it with all the intensity of a mean and stubborn nature. He had visions, at first, of a successful action for assault and battery; but, as his rage moderated, he saw certain difficulties in the way. His only witnesses would be hostile, and it was even questionable if a bench of magistrates would convict Armathwaite when it was shown that he, Walker, had virtually forced an entry into the house, and refused to leave when requested.

But he could strike more subtly and vindictively through the authorities. Marguérite Garth had said that 

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