“Idiot!” said Toby tersely.

“Who?” said Bunny.  “And why?”

“The woman.  Why didn’t she throw herself over?  It would have been much easier.”

“Perhaps she didn’t find it so,” said Bunny.  “And she’d doubtless have done the haunting stunt even if she had.”

“Well, then, why didn’t she marry the brute and—­and—­give him hell?” said Toby tensely.

Bunny uttered a shout of laughter that echoed and re-echoed up and down the winding stair.

“Is that what you would have done?”

“I’d have done one or the other,” said Toby.

“By Jove, how bloodthirsty you sound!” ejaculated Bunny.  “Are you in earnest by any chance?”

“Yes, I am in earnest.”  There was a note of bitter challenge in Toby’s reply.  “If a woman hasn’t the spunk to defend herself, she’s better dead.”

“I agree with you there,” said Bunny with decision.  “But I don’t know how you come to know it.”

“Oh, I know a lot of things,” said Toby’s voice in the darkness, and this time it sounded oddly cold and desolate as if the stone walls around them had somehow deadened it.

He put out a hand and touched her, for she seemed in some fashion to have withdrawn from him, to have become remote as the echoes about them.  “There are heaps of things you don’t know anyway,” he said.  “You’re only a kid after all.”

“Think so?” said Toby.

She evaded his hand, flitting up before him towards that grim slit in the wall through which the dim half-light of the summer night vaguely entered.  Her light figure became visible to him as she reached it.  There came to him a swift memory of the butterfly-beauty that had so astounded him earlier in the evening.

“No, I don’t,” he said.  “You’re past that stage.  What on earth has Maud been doing to you?  Do you know when you first came into the drawing-room tonight I hardly knew you?”

Toby’s light laugh came back to him.  She was like a white butterfly flitting before him in the twilight.  “I wondered what you’d say.  I’ve given up jumping rosebushes, and I’m learning to be respectable.  It’s rather fun sometimes.  Maud is very good to me—­and I love Jake, don’t you?”

“Yes, he’s a brick; always was,” said Bunny enthusiastically.  “I’d back him every time.  But, I say.  Don’t get too respectable, will you?  Somehow it doesn’t suit you.”

Again he heard her laugh in the darkness—­a quick, rather breathless laugh.  “I don’t think I’ll ever be that,” she said.  “Do you?”

“I don’t know,” said Bunny.  “But you looked scared to death when you came in—­as if you were mounted on a horse that was much too high for you.  I believe you were afraid of that old daddy of yours.”

“I am rather,” said Toby.  “You see, I don’t know him very well.  And I’m not sure he likes me.”

“Of course he likes you,” said Bunny.

“Why?  I don’t know why he should.”