Now ordinarily Esdaile's face, clean-shaven since 1914, is quite a pleasant one to look at, lightly browned, and with the savor of the sea still lingering about it. Nor was it noticeably pale now. Indeed, you might have said that some inner excitation made it not pale at all. But there was no disguising the strained tenseness of it. At the same time he was obviously attempting such a disguise. His features were set in a would-be-easy smile, but the smile stopped at his eyes. These blinked, though possibly at the sudden brightness after the obscurity below. And he spoke without pause or preliminary, as if rehearsing something he had had time to get letter-perfect but not to make entirely and naturally his own.

"Did you think I was never coming up?" The mechanical smile was turned on us all in turn. "I suppose I have been rather a long time. Just wool-gathering. I apologize to everybody. Where are the liqueur-glasses?"

There was a dead silence. Was it possible that he had heard nothing, knew nothing of what had occurred?

Monty Rooke was the first to speak.

"Do you mean to say you didn't hear it?" he blurted out.

Then, as Philip seemed to concentrate that artificial smile suddenly on him alone, he seemed sorry he had drawn attention to himself.

"And where on earth have you been?" Philip[Pg 25] demanded slowly. "What's the matter with your clothes? Been emptying the dustbins? Here, let me give you a clean-up, man——"

[Pg 25]

He got rid of the jar of liqueur, not by putting it down on a table, but by the simple if unusual expedient of letting it drop through his fingers, where it made a heavy thump, rolled over on its side, and came to rest. He stepped forward.

But Rooke, for some reason or other, stepped much more quickly back. He muttered something about his clothes not mattering—it was only a few grains of dust, but damp—better let it dry before touching it——

It was at this point that I caught Cecil Hubbard's eye.

Hubbard's is a bright blue eye, with angular lids like little set-squares and a tiny dark dot in the middle of the blue. That eye may not know very much about pictures, but it knows a good deal about men and their faces. Esdaile was taking risks if he hoped to play any tricks with that eye on him.

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