“What made you change your mind?” he asked impersonally.

It was this curious detachment of Dickie’s, this imperturbability, that most infuriated Hudson.  He flushed.

“Just a little sass from you will bring me back to the idea,” he said sharply.

Dickie lowered his eyes.

“What made me change was—­Miss Arundel’s kindness.  She came and begged you off.  She said you hadn’t done anything or said anything to frighten her, that you’d been”—­Sylvester drawled out the two words in the sing-song of Western mockery—­“‘sweet and love-ly.’”

Dickie’s face was pink.  He began to tie a knot in the corner of one of his thin gray sheet-blankets.

“I don’t know how sweet and lovely you can be, Dickie, when you’re lit up, but I guess you were awful sweet.  Anyway, if you didn’t say anything or do anything to scare her, you don’t deserve a kickin’.  But, just the same, I’ve a mind to turn you out of Millings.”

This time, Dickie’s look was not ironical.  It was terrified.  “Oh, Poppa, say!  I’ll try not to do it again.”

“I never heard that before, did I?” sneered Sylvester.  “You put shame on me and my bar.  And I’m not goin’ to stand it.  If you want to get drunk buy a bottle and come up here in your room.  God damn you!  You’re a nice son for the owner of The Aura!”

He stood up and looked with frank disgust at the thin, huddled figure.  Under this look, Dickie grew slowly redder and his eyes watered.

Sylvester lifted his upper lip.  “Faugh!” he said.  He walked over to the door.  “Get up and go down to your job and don’t you bother Miss Sheila—­hear me?  Keep away from her.  She’s not used to your sort and you’ll disgust her.  She’s here under my protection and I’ve got my plans for her.  I’m her guardian—­that’s what I am.”  Sylvester was pleased like a man that has made a discovery.  “Her guardian,” he repeated as though the word had a fine taste.

Dickie watched him.  There was no expression whatever in his face and his lips stood vacantly apart.  He might have been seven years old.

“Keep away from her—­hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dickie meekly.

After his father had gone out, Dickie sat for an instant with his head on one side, listening intently.  Then he got up, limped quietly and quickly on his bare feet out into the hall, and locked the linen-room door on the outside.

“Amelia’s clean forgot to lock it,” he said aloud.  “Ain’t she careless, though, this morning!”

He went back.  There was certainly a sound now behind the partition, a sound of hard breathing that could no longer be controlled.

“I’ll hand the key over to Mary,” soliloquized Dickie in the hollow and unnatural voice of stage confidences.  “She’ll be goin’ in for the towels about noon.”

Then he fell on his bed and smothered a fit of chuckling.