This sudden unreasoning hatred, so foreign to his gentle nature, seemed to stagger Arthur Agar as the sudden intimation of some mortal disease lurking in his own being would have done. He gripped the back of the spindle-legged chair, and could find no word to say. The stranger it was who spoke.
"I presume," he said, with a pleasant smile, in a voice so musical that his hearer breathed suddenly as if his head had been lifted from water, "I presume that you are Mr. Arthur Agar?"
While he spoke he looked past Arthur, out of the silken-draped window. He did not seem to like the glance of this young man, for even the most practical of us have a conscience at times.
The new-comer laid his walking-stick on the table, and turned to make sure that the door was closed.
"I knew your step-brother," he explained, "Jem Agar, in India."
Then the instinct of the gentleman and the host asserted itself over and above the throbbing hatred.
The stranger took the proffered chair and laid aside his hat. But neither of them was at ease. There was a subtle suggestion that they had met before and quarrelled--vague, unreasoning, quite impossible if you will; but it was there. They were as men meeting again with a past between them (too full of strong passions ever to be forgotten) which each was trying in vain to ignore.
"I have brought home a few belongings of his," the stranger went on to explain. "Just a port-manteau with some clothes and things."
He paused, and drew a small packet from the pocket of a covert-coat which he carried over his arm.
"Here," he went on, "are some papers of his--a diary and one or two letters. The rest of the things are at my hotel in town."
Arthur took the packet, and, still in the same dreamy, unreal way, opened it. He turned to the last entry--dated six weeks back.
"Got out of bed at five, but nothing to be seen in the valley. I feel a bit chippy this morning. If nothing turns up to-day shall begin to feel uneasy. The men seem all right. They are plucky little fellows."
There was a self-consciousness about Jem Agar's diary, a selection of the right word, which conveyed nothing to Arthur. But it fell into other hands later on, where it was understood better.
General Michael was watching the undergraduate with the same critical attention which he had brought to bear on the writer of the diary not two months before.