Tommy confronted him uncompromisingly.  “I want to know the truth, that’s all,” he said.  “Can’t you stop this dust-throwing business and be straight with me?”

His tone was stubborn, his attitude almost hostile.  Yet beneath it all there ran a vein of something that was very like entreaty.  And Everard, steadily watching him, smiled—­the faint grim smile of the fighter who sees a gap in his enemy’s defences.

“I’m afraid not,” he said.  “I don’t want to be brutal, but—­you see, Tommy—­it’s not your business.”

Tommy flinched a little, but he stood his ground.  “I think you’re forgetting,” he said, “that Stella is my sister.  It’s up to me to protect her.”

“From me?” Everard’s words came swift and sharp as a sword-thrust.

Tommy turned suddenly white, but he straightened himself with a gesture that was not without dignity.  “If necessary—­yes,” he said.

An abrupt silence followed his words.  They stood facing each other, and the stillness between them was such that they could hear Scooter beyond the closed window scratching against his prison-walls for freedom.

It seemed endless to Tommy.  He came through it unfaltering, but he felt physically sick, as if he had been struck in the back.

When Everard spoke at last, his hands clenched involuntarily.  He half expected violence.  But there was no hint of anger about the elder man.  He had himself under iron control.  His face was flint-like in its composure, his mouth implacably grim.

“Thanks for the warning!” he said briefly.  “It’s just as well to know how we stand.  Is that all you wanted to say?”

The dismissal was as definite as if he had actually seized and thrown him out of the room.  And yet there was not even suppressed wrath in his speech.  It was indifferent, remote as a voice from the desert-distance.  His eyes looked upon Tommy without interest or any sort of warmth, as though he had been a total stranger.

In that moment Tommy saw that sacred thing, their friendship, shattered and lying in the dust.  It was not he who had flung it there, yet his soul cried out in bitter self-reproach.  This was the man who had been closer to him than a brother, the man who had saved him from disaster physically and morally, watching over him with a grim tenderness that nothing had ever changed.

And now it was all done with.  There was nothing left but to turn and go.

But could he?  He stood irresolute, biting his lips, held there by a force that seemed outside himself.  And it was Everard who made the first move, turning from him as if he had ceased to count and pulling out a note-book that he always carried to make some entry.

Tommy stood yet a moment longer as if, had it been possible, he would have broken through the barrier between them even then.  But Everard did not so much as glance in his direction, and the moment passed.

In utter silence he turned and went out as he had entered.  There was nothing more to be said.