“Maclaren,” said the other, as he stopped in front of the garage, “if everyone was as good a passenger as you I’d enjoy motoring; but after all, a car can’t act up like a horse.”  He concluded gloomily:  “There’s no fight in it.”

And he started toward the house, but Maclaren, staring after the departing figure, muttered:  “There’s only one sort that’s worse than a damn fool, and that’s a young one.”

It was through a door opening off the veranda that Anthony entered the house, stealthily as a burglar, and with the same nervous apprehension.  Before him stretched a wide hall, dimly illumined by a single light which splashed on the Italian table and went glimmering across the floor.  Across the hall was his destination—­the broad balustraded staircase, which swept grandly up to the second floor.  Toward this he tiptoed steadying himself with one hand against the wall.  Almost to his goal, he heard a muffled footfall and shrank against the wall with a catlike agility, but, though the shadow fell steep and gloomy there, luck was against him.

A middle-aged servant of solemn port, serene with the twofold dignity of double chin and bald head, paused at the table in his progress across the room, and swept the apartment with the judicial eye of one who knows that everything is as it should be but will not trust even the silence of night.  So that bland blue eye struck first on the faintly shining top hat of Anthony, ran down his overcoat, and lingered in gloomy dismay on the telltale streak of white where the trouser leg should have been.

What he thought not even another Oedipus could have conjectured.  The young master very obviously did not wish to be observed, and in such times Peters at could be blinder than the bat noon-day and more secret than the River Styx.  He turned away, unhurried, the fold of that double chin a little more pronounced over the severe correctness of his collar.

A very sibilant whisper pursued him.  He stopped again, still without haste, and turned not directly toward Anthony, but at a discreet angle, with his eyes fixed firmly upon the ceiling.

CHAPTER IV

A SESSION OF CHAT

The whisper grew distinct in words.

“Peters, you old numskull, come here!”

The approach of Peters was something like the sidewise waddle of a very aged crab.  He looked to the north, but his feet carried him to the east.  That he was much moved was attested by the colour which had mounted even to the gleaming expanse of that nobly bald head.

“Yes, Master Anthony—­I mean Mr. Anthony?”

He set his teeth at the faux pas.

“Peters, look at me.  Confound it, I haven’t murdered any one.  Are you busy?”

It required whole seconds for the eyes to wheel round upon Anthony, and they were immediately debased from the telltale white of that leg to the floor.