“Will you take me over and present me?  I think it is due Mr. Perkins that some one should give him a frank opinion of his actions.”

“I’d like to hear that,” observed Cluff, who was not without humanistic curiosity.  “Come along.”

Heaving up his six-feet-one from the seat, he led the way to the two conversing men.  Raimonda looked around and greeted the newcomers pleasantly.  Cluff waved an explanatory hand between his charge and the bench.

“Make you acquainted with Mr. Perkins,” he said, neglecting to mention the name of the first party of the introduction.

Perkins, goggling upward to meet a coldly hostile glance, rose, nodded in some wonder, and said:  “How do you do?” Raimonda sent Cluff a glance of interrogation, to which that experimentalist in human antagonisms responded with a borrowed Spanish gesture of pleasurable uncertainty.

“I will not say that I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Perkins,” began Carroll weightily, and paused.

If he expected a query, he was doomed to a disappointment.  Such of the Perkins features as were not concealed by his extraordinary glasses expressed an immovable calm.

“Doubtless you know to what I refer.”

Still those blank brown glasses regarded him in silence.

“Do you or do you not?” demanded Carroll, struggling to keep his temper in the face of this exasperating irresponsiveness.

“Haven’t the least idea,” replied Perkins equably.

“You were on the tram this morning when Miss Brewster was insulted, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And ran away?”

“I did.”

“What did you run away for?”

“I ran away,” the other sweetly informed him, “on important business of my own.”

Cluff snickered.  The suspicion impinged upon Carroll’s mind that this wasn’t going to be as simple as he had expected.

“Let that go for the moment.  Do you know Miss Brewster’s insulter?”

“No.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” asked the Southerner sternly.

The begoggled one’s chin jerked up.  To the trained eye of Cluff, swift to interpret physical indications, it seemed that Perkins’s weight had almost imperceptibly shifted its center of gravity.

“Our Southern friend is going to run into something if he doesn’t look out,” he reflected.

But there was no hint of trouble in Perkins’s voice as he replied:—­

“I know who he is.  I don’t know him.”

“Was it Von Plaanden?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because,” returned the other, with convincing coolness, “if it was, I intend to slap his face publicly as soon as I can find him.”

“You must do nothing of the sort.”

Now, indeed, there was a change in the other’s bearing.  The words came sharp and crisp.

“I shall do exactly as I said.  Perhaps you will explain why you think otherwise.”