call. Old Holles, my Lord's man, is dying up yonder, and the whim seized
him to have a clergyman in. God knows why, for it appears to me that one
knave might very easily make his way to hell without having another knave
to help him. And Holles?--eh, well, from what I myself know of him, the
rogue is triply damned." His mouth puckered as he set about unbuttoning his
long, rain-spattered cloak, which, with his big hat, he flung aside upon a
table. "Gad!" said Simon Orts, "we are most of us damned on Usk; and that
is why I don't like it--" He struck his hand against his thigh. "I don't
like it, Anastasia."

"You must pardon me," she languidly retorted, "but I was never good at
riddles."

He turned and glanced about the hall, debating. Lady Allonby meanwhile
regarded him, as she might have looked at a frog or a hurtless snake. A
small, slim, anxious man, she found him; always fidgeting, always placating
some one, but never without a covert sneer. The fellow was venomous; his
eyes only were honest, for even while his lips were about their wheedling,
these eyes flashed malice at you; and their shifting was so unremittent
that afterward you recalled them as an absolute shining which had not any
color. On Usk and thereabouts they said it was the glare from within of his
damned soul, already at white heat; but they were a plain-spoken lot on
Usk. To-night Simon Orts was all in black; and his hair, too, and his gross
eyebrows were black, and well-nigh to the cheek-bones of his clean-shaven
countenance the thick beard, showed black through the skin.

Now he kept silence for a lengthy interval, his arms crossed on his breast,
gnawing meanwhile at the fingernails of his left hand in an unattractive
fashion he had of meditating. When words came it was in a torrent.