As Neil looked Brady dropped on his knees beside the Colonel, felt for his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself, and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him without surprise, if without much pleasure, it appeared.
"You drunken fool," Neil began furiously, then stopped, staring at his cousin. Whatever the meaning of this exhibition was, Charlie was not drunk. The excitement that possessed him was excitement of some other kind. It possessed him entirely, though it was under control for the moment. His muscles twitched with it. His shoulders shifted restlessly. His hands closed and unclosed. His eyes were strangely lit, and there was an absent, exalted look about them. Whatever the excitement, it was strong--stronger than Charlie. Neil, his eyes now used to the half-light, could see no weapon in the room, dropped on the floor or discarded. Mr. Brady, normally a coward in his cups and out of them, had attacked his enemy with his bare hands.
"Charlie, what's got you?" Neil said. "What's come to you?"
"What's come to him, there?" Charlie said, in a voice that was changed, too, and was as remote and as strange as his eyes, a low voice, with the deceptive, terrible calm of gathering hysteria about it.
"Look what's come to him," the voice went on. "Don't he deserve it, and worse? How did I find him to-day when I broke in through the window there? At his old tricks again. There was a woman with him in the library there, when he came out to me. He locked the door. She's there now. Neil, you'd better get away from here. I don't know what you're doing here, but you'd better go, and go quick."
He had given this advice indifferently. He made his next observation indifferently, too, with his furtive, absent eyes on the library door.
"No--not now. You'd better go. I want to take a look in there first. The key's in the door."
The note of command that he was used to responding to in his young cousin's voice reached and controlled Mr. Brady even now; he obeyed and swung round and stood still, looking at Neil. Neil's dark eyes, just above the level of his own, and so like them, were unrecognizable now. They were dull with anger, and they were angry with him.