“Sir Gray Eyes, I—­I ask you to believe that I don’t habitually fall about into people’s arms.  I’m developing nerves—­there is a white feather in my moral and mental plumage.”

He looked at her with grave eyes, from which he sternly banished all questioning—­and remained silent.

They passed out into the hall and, at the foot of the stairs where their ways diverged, she paused to look back at him with an unclouded smile.

“You have not told me what to wear.”

His eyes were as steady as her own.  “You will please wear the black gown with the shimmery things all over it.  I can’t describe it, but I can remember it.  And a single red rose,” he judiciously added.

“’Tis October and the florists are fifty miles away,” she demurred.  “It would take a magician’s wand to produce the red rose.”

“I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks,” he remembered.  “It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in disguise.  You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red rose.”

She threw back a laugh and was gone.

When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the “bachelors’ barracks,” as the master of “Idle Times” dubbed the wing where the unmarried men were quartered.

Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon.  Between his quarters and these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space.  Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the “neutral zone,” as Van called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or connecting their individual chambers.

Now a blaze of transoms and a sound of voices proclaimed that the apartments were tenanted.  Benton entered his own unlighted room, and then with his hand at the electric switch halted in embarrassment.

The folding-doors between his apartment and the “neutral territory” stood wide, and the attitudes and voices of the two men he saw there indicated their interview to be one in which outsiders should have no concern.  To switch on the light would be to declare himself a witness to a part at least; to remain would be to become unwilling auditor to more; to open the door he had just closed behind him would also be to attract attention to himself.  He paused in momentary uncertainty.

One of the men was Pagratide, transformed by anger; seemingly taller, darker, lither.  The second man stood calm, immobile, with his arms crossed on his breast, bending an impassive glance on the other from singularly steady eyes.  His six feet of well-proportioned stature just missed an exaggeration of soldierly bearing.

The unwavering mouth-line; level, dark brows almost meeting over unflinching gray eyes; the uncurved nose and commanding forehead were in concert with the clean, almost lean sweep of the jaw, in spelling force for field or council.