“Thinking ain't gossiping, confound you! If I wanted to gossip I'd up and say flatly that Jim Brood knows down in his soul that Freddy is no son of his. He----” “You've never heard him say so, Joe.” “No; but I can put two and two together. I'm no fool.” “I'd advise you to shut up.” “Oh, you would, would you?” with vast scorn. “I'd like to know who it was that talked to Mrs Desmond about it. Who put it into her head that Jim doubts----” “Well, didn't she say I was a lying old busybody?” snapped Danbury triumphantly. “Didn't she call me down, eh? I'd like to know what more you could expect than that. Didn't she make me take back everything I said?” “She did,” said Riggs with conviction. “And I believe she would have thrashed you if she'd been a man, just as she said she would. And didn't I advise her to do it, anyway, on the ground that you're an old woman and----” “That's got nothing to do with the present case,” interrupted Dawes hastily. “What we ought to be thinking about now is how to get rid of this woman that's come in here to wreck our home. She's an interloper. She's a foreigner. She----” “You must admit she treats us very politely,” said Riggs weakly. “Certainly she does. She has to. If she tried to come any of her high-and-mighty--ahem! Yes, Joseph, I consider Mrs Brood the loveliest, most charming----” “It was the wind blowing the curtain, Danbury,” said Riggs, reassuringly. “As I was saying,” resumed his friend, “I'd tell her what I thought of her almighty quick if she got uppish with me. The trouble is, she's so darned careful what she says to my face. I've never seen anybody as sweet as she is when she's with a feller. That all goes to prove that she's sly and unnatural. No woman ever lived who could be sweet all the time and still be as God made her. Why, she even comes up here and tries to be sweet on that 'Great Gawd Budd' thing over there. I heard her ask Ranjab one day why he never prostrated himself before the image.” “Well?” demanded Riggs, as the other paused. “She didn't have sense enough to know that Ranjab is a Brahmin, a worshipper of Vishnu and Shiva. I also heard her say that you had been so drunk up here one night that a lady fainted when she saw you sprawled out on the couch. She thought you were dead.” “I haven't been drunk in ten years! What's more, I don't remember ever having seen a strange woman in this room since I came here to visit Jim Brood, twelve years ago. She must be crazy.” “She didn't say you saw the woman. She said the woman saw you,” said Dawes witheringly. “No one ever thought of locking that cupboard until she came,” said Riggs, abruptly altering the trend of speech but not of thought. His gaze shifted to the cabinet. “Jim is like wax in her hands.”