"Why--why yes, I suppose so," Miss Babs frowned. "Try, if you want to, Higgins. But you'd better make it something simple." * * * * * Higgins swung around. "Wade across the stream, Toory," he said. Toory's eye-beams lifted. It was an order taking him off wait-command. He started to move, then stopped. Something seemed to be wrong, and he was trying very hard not to make a mistake. It was like those puzzling moments in his training when he couldn't decide what he should do. "It would be bad for you to get your legs wet, wouldn't it?" Higgins asked. "No," Toory responded. His eye-beams swung to Babs. "Do it, Toory," Babs said. The wide rocky stream was shallow directly below the gorge, so that it hardly wet Toory's knees as he waded across. "Now, come back!" Higgins called. Toory came back. Again under automatic wait-command, he stood motionless. He knew that he had done the task properly. It was strange that the unpleasant feeling inside him should persist. It was just as though he had done something wrong. "Certainly is real wonderful, Miss Babs," Higgins was exclaiming. "Real wonderful!" He gave Toory a few more orders while Babs listened, and Toory responded dutifully. But it all seemed wrong. Toory was glad when Higgins lighted another cigarette and wandered on; and then presently Toory was leading the girl home around the base of the rocky hill in the familiar way he knew so well. It was Toory's last task for the day, and nightfall found him quiescent again in the hall niche. A storm was in the making, so that there were more little noises than usual, especially after midnight when his hearing became sharpened. At monotonous intervals the big clock chimed, but soon after midnight the voice-murmurs in the house died away. Then they started again and it made Toory's eye-beams shift and his head cock a little sidewise as he listened. The voices were familiar and he knew it was Higgins and his wife whispering together in the east wing. "Oh Gil, be careful." "Sure I will. I can handle that blarsted thing now. I gave it lots of orders this afternoon." The murmurs blurred into the wind under the eaves. The night had been mostly cloudy, Toory knew, because no moonlight showed at the windows. But there was a little moonlight there now. Toory stood in his hall niche, watching it. Presently he could hear faint distant footsteps, a familiar tread, and he knew that Higgins was coming softly down through the house. It was so new a thing that a queer, sharp jangling sprang up in Toory. He was on guard-command, ready to give an alarm-call if the need came. He remembered his guard-command training, the surprise tests in the night, the whispers of two strange men outside a window he'd been guarding.