The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.

The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, having made the girl hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square landing, and looked over the rails.

The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced itself upon the eye.

Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight. In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.

He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail, when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china, coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.

Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.

It was plain that he was making for the stair, and Dick drew back behind the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.

He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever nearer and nearer.

She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could not see, draw back three steps up the passage, and start forward again with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in his stomach a kick which lifted, it seemed, the wretched creature and all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.

After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.

Dick caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a child.

"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,

"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.

Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then, having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.

Dick, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again, drawing the girl with him.

"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a bass voice, which Dick ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed to carry himself somewhat above the others.

"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And Dick imagined a suspicious glance at the stairhead.

"I guess 'e try save tray and lose balanza of 'eemself," said a third, whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected Dick with an undefined reminiscence.

"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and a shuffling of two pairs of feet.

But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain against asperity—Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head even below his defenceless knuckles.

At the sound of this voice Dick now stretched himself prone, and wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's balustrade, on the four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.

"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the body on the floor.

Melchard looked from Black Beard to the cockney, and back.

"Is it beer again? I said not more than a tumbler of whisky before lunch. Beer always plays hell with him."

"Then you should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough. Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"Appeared? Tell me what happened," said Melchard, querulously.

"Fell right down the stair, tray and all," said Black Beard, "just as if he'd been pushed."

Melchard was stooping over the scarce breathing body.

"He's not dead," he declared.

"He will be," said Black Beard, "unless you 'phone to Millsborough for a doctor damn quick."

"Don't be a fool, Ockley. Better let him die than bring a sharp-witted medical practitioner to my house, to-day of all days."

"If we have a death here in your house," Ockley retorted, "they'll want to know how and why and when. And 'no doctor called'—and 'this shady Mr. Melchard'—and all the damned things that always happen. Will that be good for your health—with the whole game in your hands, too?"

Melchard was hit, and Dick thought that he saw his face lose colour.

"Well?" he said nervously.

"Either fetch medical aid," replied Ockley, "or bury him under the ash-heap. And that's going a bit far for an accident."

"Was he pushed? I wonder," said Melchard; and the pair, with heads together, spoke in whispers inaudible to Dick, who writhed himself six inches back from the baluster, in fear of the upward glance which might come at any moment.

He had heard enough, and his usual policy came into play.

Amaryllis was able to watch him without exposing herself to the eyes of the enemy; for they had gathered round the injured tray-bearer so near to her side of the hall that the floor of the gallery shut off their view of anything below the top of the arch round whose side she peered, crouching low.

Dick, then, she saw moving snake-wise to the stair; and she marvelled that, even in the hush of the voices below, no slightest sound of his movement reached her ear. Chin first, his head disappeared over the first step, the long body dragging after it, half-inch by half-inch, until all of him that she could see was the thick soles of his boots, clinging, as it appeared, by their toes to the edge of the highest step.

Her heart shook for his danger, which now so closely embraced her own that she forgot its separate significance.

The voices rose again.

"But you're a qualified man yourself," said Melchard. "You'll be responsible."

"Fat lot of good that'll do you," replied Black Beard. "Qualified, by God! When I can't prove it without proving also that I'm off the register, and that my name's not Ockley!" He broke off with an ugly laugh, then added: "Let's go up and see."

And now Amaryllis saw her serpent shoot up to a great rod of vengeance. Before she could ask herself, "What is he going to do?" Dick Bellamy had done it; vaulting, even as he rose, over the rail of the stair, and, with an appalling scream which might have come from a maniac in frenzy, or the mortal agony of a wounded beast, literally falling upon his enemies.

His right foot caught Melchard between jaw and shoulder, shooting him supine and headlong upon the polished floor until his head hit the corner of the stone kerb about the hearth; while the left knee simultaneously struck the cockney, who fell, with Dick's crouching weight full upon him, heavily to the ground; and Amaryllis, fear forgotten, leaning over the rail, heard at the same moment, but as separate sounds, the blow of the under man's head upon the boards and that of Dick's right fist on its left jaw.

Then Dick was on his feet again, but barely in time. For in the clamour and rushing fall of this wild figure, clad in grey flannel trousers and blue shirt, with lank black hair flying stiffly up and away from the savage mouth and blazing blue eyes, Ockley had leapt back out of reach. But the little Spaniard, standing apart, was astonished; his dark eyes showed wide rings of white eyeball, and the open mouth teeth even whiter, as he stared, aghast yet curious, at the living thunderbolt which had fallen so near to him.

Ockley, however, directly his eyes had taken in what he had leapt back from, had begun what even Amaryllis could see was the rush of an expert. He did not, indeed, catch Dick upon his knees, as she had feared, but left him little time to steady himself. She could see that the big man was brave, and as strong as a bull, so that hers looked slender by comparison.

But Dick was less unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against the balustrade of the stair.

And now the Spaniard found what he had been looking for.

"Por Dios!" he wailed, "it iss Limping Deek!" and so fled.

Dick followed up his advantage, forcing the pace, but Ockley would have none of it until he had worked himself into the middle of the floor; then suddenly coming again, got home with a tremendous right which Dick failed to stop with anything better than his left cheek-bone.

The blow was well timed and delivered with the full force of a strong man fighting scientifically, perhaps for his life; and Dick Bellamy knew that, hard as he kept himself, he could not afford to take another of its kind.

Crouching, he watched Black Beard between his fists which protected his face, the perpendicular fore-arms guarding his body; and in the moment while his sight was clearing, he heard, from somewhere above him, a little agonized moan, and found himself again.

Ockley, elated, pursued his advantage with a savage left drive which might have proved worse for Dick than the right which had just split his cheek, had he not, ducking to his right in perfect time, met the big man with a heavy left jolt in the mouth, and, simultaneously advancing his right foot and straightening his body, followed it up with a right to the jaw that knocked his opponent full length. He fell and lay beyond the projection of the hearth on the other side of which was Melchard, still as death.