"Friendship!"

He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it through
the window. He turned his back on that temptation. Then suddenly he
seized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his table and contained
the better part of a week's work--a displayed dissection of a snail,
beautifully done--and hurled it across the room, to smash resoundingly
upon the cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either haste
or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to
mingle with the debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes.
"H'm!" he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. "Silly!" he
remarked after a pause. "One hardly knows--all the time."

He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle, and he
went to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood there, looking,
save for the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness, the
embodiment of blond serenity.

"Gellett," he called, "just come and clear up a mess, will you? I've
smashed some things."



Part 3


There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica's arrangements for
self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her--he and his
loan to her and his connection with her and that terrible evening--a
vague, disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure. She could