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"Of course. Good night, Von Holzen." And Percy Roden passed through the gateway, walking slowly across the dunes towards his own house; while Von Holzen watched him from the window of the little three-roomed cottage. "Le plus sur moyen d'arriver a son but c'est de ne pas faire de rencontres en chemin." "Yes, it was long ago 'lang, lang izt's her' you remember the song Frau Neumayer always sang.
"No," replied Von Holzen, instantly, as if he had long known what the ultimatum would be. Cornish turned interrogatively to Roden. His eyes urged Roden to accept. "No," was the reply. Mr. Wade took out his large gold watch and looked at it. "Then there is no need," he said composedly, "to detain these gentlemen any longer." "The world will not believe a man repents.
He was later than usual. The malgamite works had during the last few weeks been absorbing more and more of his attention. When he returned home, tired, in the evening, he was not communicative. As for Otto von Holzen, he never showed his face outside the works now, but seemed to live the life of a recluse within the iron fence that surrounded the little colony.
Roden turned in his leisurely way, and looked over his shoulder towards the paper. Von Holzen glanced at Dorothy. He had no desire to keep her in suspense, but he wished to know how much she knew. She looked into the fire, treating his conversation as directed towards her brother only. "I tried for ten years in vain to get this," continued Von Holzen, "and at last a dying man dictated it to me.
There is for some men a certain satisfaction in antagonism, and a stern regard for a strong foe which reached its culmination, perhaps, in that Saxon knight who desired to be buried in the same chapel as his lifelong foe between him, indeed, and the door so that at the resurrection day they should not miss each other. Von Holzen seemed to have somewhat of this feeling for Cornish.
In the dark, mere inches are much equalized between men but Von Holzen had a knife. Cornish, who held nothing in his hands, knew that he was at a fatal disadvantage. Again, Von Holzen ran at him with his arm outstretched for a swinging stab. Cornish, in a flash of thought, recognized that he could not meet this. He stepped neatly aside.
"I must stop it whatever it may cost me." "Yes," she answered again. "I am going to the works to-night to have it out with Von Holzen and your brother. It is impossible to say how matters really stand how much your brother knows, I mean for Von Holzen is clever. He is a cold, calculating man, who rules all who come near him. Your brother has only to do with the money part of it.
For man is essentially the first of the "game" animals and beneath fine clothes there nearly always beats a heart ready, quite suddenly, to snatch the fearful joy of battle. Von Holzen did not disappoint him, but came flying on silent feet, like some beast of prey, from the darkness. Cornish had played half-back for his school not so many years before.
Von Holzen was betrayed into a momentary gaucheness, as if he were not quite at home in a drawing-room. Roden drew forward a chair, and seated himself near to Mrs. Vansittart with an air of familiarity which the lady seemed rather to invite than to resent. They had, it appeared, many topics in common. Roden had come with the purpose of seeing Mrs. Vansittart, and no one else.
"Then," he said, lapsing in his self-forgetfulness into the terse language of his everyday life and thought, "what on earth have you been driving at all along?" "I have been driving at Herr von Holzen and the Malgamite scheme. I have been helping Tony Cornish," she answered. So Percy Roden quitted the house at the corner of Park Straat a wiser man, and perhaps he left a wiser woman in it.
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