"No, you mayn't." Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the other. "You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you will apologise-- If you aren't you won't and I will deal with you in Charleston accordingly." Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie Calhoun--the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney. She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas's right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting convulsively. She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his hand. Then she was gripping his wrist. Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye. Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey. It was her soul that held him, her spirit--call it what you will, the something that speaks alone through the eye. Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken, breathless, without making the slightest movement. They saw she was holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not theirs, that the contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness. Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time. Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor. It was like the breaking of a spell. Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall. Pinckney, stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and laughing. Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away under one of the seats. Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom. Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone. "What are you going to do?" asked Calhoun. "I am at his disposal," replied the other. "I struck him." "Struck him, damnation! He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out of the club; he'd have had you only for that girl. I never saw anything so splendid in my life." "Yes," said Pinckney, "she saved my life. He was clean mad, but thank God no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene. Say nothing to any one unless he wants to push the matter further. I am quite at his disposal." PART IV