Chapter Four.

Siege House and its Ways.

“Oh, what a perfect beauty! Look, Bob. Free wheel, Bowden brakes, everything.”

The hall of Siege House was littered with wrappings and twine, in the midst of which stood Delia Calmour, in a fervour of delight and admiration, while her brother Bob extracted from its crate a brand new bicycle which had just been delivered by railway van.

“Rather! Gee and Vincent, tip-top maker,” pronounced the said Bob, wheeling her machine clear of the litter and surveying it critically. “You’re in luck’s way this time, Delia. First chop new bike for a beginning, and now what about the damages? I’m only wondering whether five hundred would be starting too low.”

“Damages! What are you talking about?” said Delia shortly.

“Why, you got a toss, didn’t you—a bad one too—and owing to Wagram’s wild beast. There you are. First-rate grounds for action. Damages a dead cert. The only question is how much.”

“Oh Bob, don’t be such a beastly young cad,” retorted Delia, with a heightened colour and a flash in her eyes, plain speaking being the custom at Siege House. “But then I forgot,” she continued, coldly ironical. “It’s your trade to scent out plunder, or will be when you’ve learnt it. Good boy, Bob. Stick to biz, and never miss a chance.”

The point of which remark was that its object was in the employ of a firm of solicitors. Incidentally, he was a loose hung, pale faced youth, who was won’t to turn on an exaggerated raffishness out of office hours, under the impression that it was sporting.

“I should think not,” retorted Bob angrily. “And I don’t see any sense in jumping down my throat because I want to do you a good turn.”

“What are you kicking up such a row about Bob, and how the devil am I going to get through my typing in the middle of all this jaw?”

The above, uttered in a sweet and fluty voice, proceeded from an exceedingly handsome girl who now appeared from an adjoining door. She had straight regular features of the classical order, and a pair of large limpid blue eyes, the soulful innocence of whose expression imparted an air of spirituality to the whole face. Yet never was expression more entirely deceptive.

“Oh, keep your hair on, Clytie. I’m only telling Delia how to get five hundred damages out of Wagram. You’d never have got your cool thou, out of Vance if it hadn’t been for me. It’s her turn now,” sneered Bob.

“You mean I’d never have got what your precious firm chose to pass on to me out of it,” retorted the girl serenely. Her brother grinned.

“Biz is biz and costs are costs. We don’t want work for nothing in the law,” he added.

“We! M’yes. Grandiloquent, very. So that’s the new bike?” going over to examine it. “It is a ripper. D’you think there are any more African wild beasts loose at Hilversea, Delia? I could do with a new bike myself.”

Delia, listening, was simply incapable of reply lest she should reveal the lurid anger which was simmering beneath. Her long absence from home and its incidents had gone far towards refining away the cynical vulgarity of mind and speech which was the prevailing tone in her family circle, from her father downwards. Not this alone, however, was at the back of her present indignation. A week had elapsed since her adventure, and the recollection of the acquaintanceship to which it had led—matter of a few minutes as such had been—glowed fresh in her mind, as indeed it had done ever since; though not for worlds would she have let drop word or hint to those about her that such was the case. She was by no means deficient in assurance and self-esteem, yet that day in the presence of Wagram she had felt inferior. He had seemed to her as a different order of being, this man whose prompt courage and readiness, and the exercise thereof, had glided so naturally into the calm considerate kindness whose first thought had been to make good her loss. The refinement of his aspect and manner, the utter absence of even any passing instinct to improve the situation, so different to those among whom she lived and moved, had completed the spell of magnetism he had all unconsciously cast over her, and in that short space her mind had undergone a complete transformation. Had the case been put before her as that of somebody else, Delia would unhesitatingly have pronounced it as one of falling over head and ears in love. Being her own it took on the aspect of a conversion to a sublime and compelling creed, the deity whereof was Wagram. And this was the man against whom her brother was suggesting a low and vulgar scheme of plunder—legal plunder, it was true, but still plunder.

“Bob,” she said at last. “If ever you propose such a thing again, from that moment you and I are no longer on speaking terms. I never heard a more unutterably caddish suggestion, and I’ve heard more than one as you know,” she added witheringly.

“Don’t see it at all. Damage to person pursuing lawful way along a public road—dangerous animal—property of ‘coiny’ swells. Coiny swells able to pay. Make ’em. What’s the law for, I’d like to know?”

“To swindle and fleece respectable people. To fatten a pack of bloodsucking thieves,” answered Delia, with trembling lips and flashing eyes. “In this instance I’d rather hang myself than have anything to do with it. Law, indeed!”

“Would you?” growled Bob. “Well, then, you won’t get any choice, because the old man’ll take it up, and then you’ll have to come forward. And he’ll collar the damages instead of you.”

“He’ll get none. I’ll refuse to appear.”

“Ha—ha. You’ll have to. You’ll be subpoenaed.”

“See here, my sucking Blackstone,” struck in Clytie, answering for her sister. “You remind one of the old chestnut about the judge who was nicknamed Necessity, because he knew no law. You haven’t even begun to know any. Delia’s of full age, and therefore no one could sue but her. The old man’s counted out.”

“You seemed to know more than enough that time you were under cross-examination,” jeered the exasperated Bob.

“Yes, I didn’t do badly,” acquiesced Clytie, her serenity quite unruffled. “But you know, Bob, you’re an awful juggins—yes, an out and out juggins.”

“I suppose so. May I ask why?”

“Certainly. Here you are putting Delia up to a scheme which is like being content with one silver spoon when you could collar the whole swag.” (The speaker was in course of typing a detective story.) “Now—d’you see?”

“Hanged if I do,” snorted Bob. “There’s nothing in it either. These Wagrams are rolling in coin, but you mustn’t pitch your claim too high. There’s such a thing as