“Everything goes--between friends,” said Carfax, who could never take the trouble to put his displeasure into any permanent form. “It does look as if you were up against it, before and behind. Far be it from me to break the bruised reed, or to quench the smoking flax.” “Oh, confound you for a Job’s comforter!” rasped Tregarvon, breaking out afresh. “I’ve got to believe in people--I’m built that way; and if I could think for a moment that Richardia is Hartridge’s accomplice in this contemptible trickery of his----” “Well, if you could?” prompted the comforter, after the pause had grown overlong. “If I could, I’d lose faith in my own good intentions,” finished Tregarvon, whose stock of comparisons was running low. “Still,” he went on, talking now because he was started and could not stop, “still it’s against me, Poictiers; the whole world is against me. In that same talk in the music-room this evening--while you were away with the Caswells--Richardia was anxious about these happenings of ours; afraid somebody would get hurt; in fact, she made me promise not to hurt anybody.” “Meaning Professor William Wilberforce Hartridge, M.A., Vanderbilt?” “No; er--that is, I don’t think she meant him.” Tregarvon was not yet ready to tell Carfax that he was well assured that her fear was for her father; though she had not bound him to secrecy, he felt that what she had said had been spoken in confidence. Carfax got up from his cramped sitting on the door-step, stretched, yawned, and looked at his watch, holding the dial up to the moonlight. “Ten minutes past eleven,” he announced. “Do we turn in and sleep a few lines? Or is it to be a continuous performance--like those that the vaudeville people advertise?” “Go inside and finish your nap,” Tregarvon directed, filling and lighting his pipe. “I’m not sleepy now; don’t know as I ever shall be again.” “You think the curtain has been rung down for to-night?” “You’d say so, wouldn’t you? The star has gone home and has probably gone to bed. If he should get up and walk in his sleep, I’ll call you.” Carfax hung upon the threshold. “Better call me, anyhow, after I’ve had another forty winks or so, so you can take your turn. People have to sleep, you know--even after a funeral.” “You go to bed!” was the gruff command; and Tregarvon began a monotonous sentry beat up and down before the tool-house. But a minute later he thrust his face in at the little square window to say: “Asleep yet?” “My Heavens, no!” returned a querulous voice in the inner darkness. “Do you take me for an auto-hypnotist?” “I have just developed a notion, and it is beginning to gnaw me,” explained the sentinel on duty. “What if the man who was on his knees at the test-hole when I went to waken you wasn’t Hartridge, after all?”