"You will not leave me, Mr. Tickell, till you have given me certain explanations which I am about to require from you. Sit down."
Nothing could have been more dictatorial than her manner, or more uncalled for; his visage sufficiently expressed the amazement he felt.
"You have done me a very serious injury, Mr. Tickell, a wrong which no man with any pretensions to decency would do any woman; if you decline to sit down, if you try to leave this place, there'll be a scandal, because I shall follow you into the ballroom, and wring an explanation from you there. I am not friendless; I will take care that you don't leave this house till I have it."
The young gentleman sat down, with every appearance of the most extreme discomfiture. His words came from stammering lips.
"I--I--I never heard such a thing in my life; I--I've done you a wrong? Why, Miss Forster, I never met you before. Of course, I've heard of you, everybody has; as--as to doing you a wrong, I'd no more think of doing you a wrong than--than---- Whatever makes you think I have?"
She resumed her seat beside him with an air that was much more commanding than he had ever seen worn by his colonel.
"Be so good as to answer the question which I put to you just now, Mr. Tickell: why did you convey to your own pockets the contents of the pool which properly belonged to Mr. Beaton, since he had won it?"
"I do not know why you are talking to me like this, Miss Forster--I give you my word I don't--but if you know so much you must know the chaps said he cheated."
"Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Tickell, on your honour, that all the men who were present in the room accused Mr. Beaton of cheating?"
"That's what it amounts to, but, of course, it began with Dodwell."
"I am perfectly aware that Captain Dodwell made a certain statement for which Mr. Beaton was only kept from knocking him down by the rest of you--brave men! What I want to know is if you were all in the conspiracy. Did you yourself see, with your own eyes, Mr. Beaton cheat?"
"Did you see anything in the least suspicious about anything he did?"
"I'm bound to say I didn't, at least, not to notice it."
"Not the faintest shadow of one, we were chums; I would as soon have suspected myself."