Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/38

 strangely detached voice, neither criminatory nor damnatory nor even angry, but stating it as a fact—a regrettable fact, but a fact.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” replied Hector. “I rather fancy you are making a mistake.”

He half turned toward his brother, who seemed puzzled, nonplussed, ill at ease, looking down at his remarkably well-made shoes as if trying to figure out something which he did not understand.

“Tollemache!” Hector laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. There was entreaty in his accents; too, a terrible pity, a terrible contempt. “I say—Tollemache, old chap, won’t you …?”

The other did not reply. Slowly he looked up. Slowly he studied his brother’s face, still with that same expression of puzzled, nonplussed embarrassment, while the younger brother turned to his father with an impatient gesture.

“I don’t want to accuse”—he checked himself, and went on: “anybody. I am trying to play the game …”

“And you will play the game!” the earl cut in. “For you are my dear son, blood of my blood and bone of my bone. I am—oh—the word is so trite, so damnably inadequate—but I’m proud of you, my boy!”

"Proud—of me, sir? And a moment ago you said that I was ruined, didn’t you? What …”

Suddenly Tollemache burst into speech, hectic, slurred, rather bitter:

“I don’t understand. I don’t know what it is all about. They were my cards. I took them from my room.