And now my blush and my powers of sympathy had betrayed me.  I felt like a convicted criminal as I said feebly, “Oh! that was an accident, absolutely an accident, I assure you.  I had no sort of idea where you were when I went up to the Home Farm....”

“After keeping an eye on the front of the house all the morning,” he put in viciously.

A sense of awful frustration overcame me.  Looking back on the past fifteen hours, I saw all my actions ranged in a long incriminating series.  Each one separately might be explained, but regarded as a consequent series, those entirely inconsequent doings of mine could bear but one explanation:  I was for some purpose of my own, whether idiotically romantic or not, on the side of Banks and Brenda.  I had never lifted a finger to help them; I was not in their confidence; and since the early morning I had withdrawn a measure of my sympathy from them.  But I could not prove any of these things.  I could only affirm them, and this domineering bully, who stood glowering at me, wanted proof or nothing.  He was too well accustomed to the methods of criminals to accept explanations.

“You don’t believe me?” I said.

“Candidly, I don’t,” he replied.

And at that my temper finally blazed.  I could not bear any longer either that awful sense of frustration or the sight of Frank Jervaise’s absurdly portentous scowl.

I did not clench my fists, but I presume my purpose showed suddenly in my face, for he moved quickly backwards with a queer, nervous jerk of the head that was the precise counterpart of the parrot-like twist his mother had given at the luncheon table.  It was an odd movement, at once timid and vicious, and in an instant I saw the spirit of Frank Jervaise revealed to me.  He was a coward, hiding his weakness under that coarse mask of the brooding, relentless hawk.  He had winced and retreated at my unspoken threat, as he had winced at the thought of his thrashing at school.  He had taken his punishment stoically enough then, and might take another with equal fortitude now; though he had been weakened in the past five or six years by the immunity his frowning face had won for him.  But he could not meet the promise of a thrashing.  I saw that he would do anything, make any admission, to avoid that.

“Look here, Melhuish...” he began, but I cut him short.

“Oh! go to hell,” I said savagely.

I was disappointed.  I wanted to fight him.  I knew now that since the scene I had witnessed in the wood the primitive savage in me had been longing for some excuse to break out in its own primitive, savage way.  And once again I was frustrated.  I was just too civilised to leap at him without further excuse.

He gave me none.

“If you’re going to take that tone...” he said with a ridiculous affectation of bravado, and did not complete his sentence.  His evasion was, perhaps, the best that he could have managed in the circumstances.  It was so obvious that only the least further incentive was required to make me an irresponsible madman.  And he dared not risk it.