"Did you hear me, you glass-eyed fool?" he barked in my ear. "You masher! By George, _I'll_ mash you!"
And he looked at Frances again and laughed, but she was looking away off up at the big stone castle on the Pocantico Hills behind. And I just reveled in her glorious profile, splashed bright by the golden sunshine reflected from the Tappan Zee opposite. Incidentally, I was trying in my mind the three arm movements that must be made as one, and for which, to learn, I had paid the great master, Galliard of Paris, a thousand francs in gold.
"All right--coming!" he yelled; and then he launched his blow. But so rapid--instantaneous, in fact--are the famous three movements of the great scientist, I don't remember that my eye even shifted its grip upon the monocle. Therefore, as I came back into the same position again as his shoulder hit the ground, I was in time to catch my darling's eye at last just as they curved. And, by Jove, she looked amused--and pleased.
As for the frump, she frankly and harshly laughed, and then moved up a speed, just as a south-bound express took the station.
And I swung aboard it, back for little old New York. Didn't see what the chauffeur did. Wasn't interested, you know, about that.
"Most infernal outrage of the century, I tell you!" Billings stormed. For an hour I had sat there in my rooms, limp and bewildered under the tempest of his wrath. The wild and incoherent sputter over the 'phone that Jenkins reported upon my return had sent me on a hunt for my friend. I had found him sullenly dining alone over at the club, and as soon as I entered he started to bolt from the room. Only through the greatest pleading had I managed to coax him back to my chambers, hoping I might screw out of him some explanation.
Of course, I recognized it all as impossible and crazy, you know, but when I said so to Billings his remarks were so violent, and he turned such a dangerous apoplectic purple, dashed if I didn't renege.
"But then the old man, you know!" I protested weakly.
Billings leveled his big arm at me, mouthing wordlessly for a minute.
"That--that'll do, about that old man!" he choked at last. "Not--not another word about _him_!" And finally he collapsed into his seat from sheer exhaustion. Just sat there panting and glaring at me like a jolly bulldog.