rowing and running and the like of that, and end in committing all the crimes in the calendar:  murder included.  Well! you may be right again there.  Who’s to know what may happen to him? or what he may not end in doing before he dies?  It may be Another, or it may be Me.  How do I know? and how do you?” He suddenly turned on the deputation, standing thunder-struck behind him.  “If you want to know what I think, there it is for you, in plain words.”

There was something, not only in the shamelessness of the declaration itself, but in the fierce pleasure that the speaker seemed to feel in making it, which struck the circle of listeners, Sir Patrick included, with a momentary chill.

In the midst of the silence a sixth guest appeared on the lawn, and stepped into the library—­a silent, resolute, unassuming, elderly man who had arrived the day before on a visit to Windygates, and who was well known, in and out of London, as one of the first consulting surgeons of his time.

“A discussion going on?” he asked.  “Am I in the way?”

“There’s no discussion—­we are all agreed,” cried Geoffrey, answering boisterously for the rest.  “The more the merrier, Sir!”

After a glance at Geoffrey, the surgeon suddenly checked himself on the point of advancing to the inner part of the room, and remained standing at the window.

“I beg your pardon,” said Sir Patrick, addressing himself to Geoffrey, with a grave dignity which was quite new in Arnold’s experience of him.  “We are not all agreed.  I decline, Mr. Delamayn, to allow you to connect me with such an expression of feeling on your part as we have just heard.  The language you have used leaves me no alternative but to meet your statement of what you suppose me to have said by my statement of what I really did say.  It is not my fault if the discussion in the garden is revived before another audience in this room—­it is yours.”

He looked as he spoke to Arnold and Blanche, and from them to the surgeon standing at the window.

The surgeon had found an occupation for himself which completely isolated him among the rest of the guests.  Keeping his own face in shadow, he was studying Geoffrey’s face, in the full flood of light that fell on it, with a steady attention which must have been generally remarked, if all eyes had not been turned toward Sir Patrick at the time.

It was not an easy face to investigate at that moment.

While Sir Patrick had been speaking Geoffrey had seated himself near the window, doggedly impenetrable to the reproof of which he was the object.  In his impatience to consult the one authority competent to decide the question of Arnold’s position toward Anne, he had sided with Sir Patrick, as a means of ridding himself of the unwelcome presence of his friends—­and he had defeated his own purpose, thanks to his own brutish incapability of bridling himself in the pursuit of it.  Whether he was now discouraged under these circumstances, or whether he was simply resigned to bide his time till his time came, it was impossible, judging by outward appearances, to say.  With a heavy dropping at the corners of his mouth, with a stolid indifference staring dull in his eyes, there he sat, a man forearmed, in his own obstinate neutrality, against all temptation to engage in the conflict of opinions that was to come.