Cardillac, seeing them and guessing their errand, recoiled with a gurgling noise in his throat. His right hand disappeared in his coat-pocket, but instantly the two men leaped on him and pinioned his arms. There was a brief, silent struggle. Suddenly he was made fast. Eva had arisen. Her guests crowded about her. She leaned against Susan’s shoulder and turned her head a little aside, as though a touch of uncanny terror brushed her. But she still smiled, though now with pallid cheeks. “He’s magnificent, magnificent, even at this moment,” Imhof whispered to Crammon. Christian stared at Cardillac’s huge back. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, like the back of an ox dragged to slaughter. The two men between whom he stood hand-cuffed had greasy necks, and the hair on the back of their heads was dirty and ill-trimmed. An unpleasant taste on his palate tormented Christian. He asked a servant for a glass of champagne. Cardillac’s words, “I have a wife and a child,” would not leave his mind. On the contrary, they sounded ever more stridently within him. And suddenly a second, foolish, curious voice in him asked: How do you suppose they look--this wife, this child? Where are they? What will become of them? It was as annoying and as painful as a toothache. XIII In Devon, south of Exeter, Denis Lay had his country seat. The manor stood in a park of immemorial trees, velvety swards, small lakes that mirrored the sky, and flowerbeds beautiful in the mildest climate of such a latitude on earth. “We’re quite near the Gulf Stream here,” Crammon explained to Christian and Eva, who, like himself, were Lay’s guests. And he had an expression as though with his own hands he had brought the warm current to the English coast from the Gulf of Mexico simply for the benefit of his friends. With a gesture of sisterly tenderness Eva walked for hours among the beds of blossoming violets. Large surfaces were mildly and radiantly blue. It was March. A company of English friends was expected, but not until two days later. The four friends, going for a walk, had been overtaken by showers and came home drenched. When they had changed their clothes, they met for tea in the library. It was a great room with wainscoting of dark oak and mighty cross-beams. Halfway up there ran along the walls a gallery with carved balustrades, and at one end, between the pointed windows, appeared the gilded pipes of an organ. The light was dim and the rain swished without. Eva held an album of Holbein drawings, and turned the pages slowly. Christian and Crammon were playing at chess. Denis watched them for a while. Then he sat down at the organ and began to play. Eva looked up from the pictures and listened. “I’ve lost the game,” Christian said. He arose and mounted the steps to the gallery. He leaned over the balustrade and looked down. In an outward curve of the balustrade there lay, like an egg in its cup, a globe on a metal stand.