Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/34

 had hoped—he did not know why—to play the hero before this girl; but now he stood before her, beaten, outdone, humbled. He saw, or thought he saw, scorn and anger in her eyes as she began to speak. Yet chance gave him a brief respite. The man lying on the grass behind her moaned, stirred, and almost instantly sat upright, looking about him with blinking, uncomprehending eyes. She paused to address him.

"You are not hurt, Richard," she said, and it seemed to Lachlan that her tone was not only faintly contemptuous but that there was in it also a strange despairing bitterness. "You have a bruised eyebrow, that is all, but it will spoil your beauty for some days."

She turned to Lachlan where he stood against the canebrake, still panting a little but clear brained now and ready for what would come. It came—without delay.

"And you, sir," she said coldly, her head high, her large eyes narrowed, "perhaps you will be so good as to make known to me who you are, and why you take it upon yourself to assault my—my friend (she hesitated a little at the word) here in my garden."

Mr. Francis O'Sullivan, the expatriate Irishman, who had schooled Lachlan McDonald in manners and in fencing (both verbal and with the rapier), to say nothing of history and the arts, would have been proud of his pupil at that moment. There was a deep purpose in Lachlan's answer, and that purpose his answer was most skilfully designed to achieve.