“You hold that in until you can’t take any more now,” Sidney spoke sharply.

A lengthy silence followed.

“Then, now, for cripes sake, now, you idiot, pull it out now!” Gareth scolded viciously. Sidney pulled out the tube as gently as possible and picking him up bodily he carried him to the chamber pot and held him down on it.

Gareth shot looks of fury, humiliation, grief and even sardonic humor with his new attendant, and then as the sounds of his bowels loosening filled the room, he shouted:

“I will get even if it takes me a hundred years!”

Looking down into the pot, after Gareth had risen and Sidney was wiping him with—at Irene’s special insistence—a very expensive thin linen cloth, he saw that what had come out of the boy was flecked with blood.

“Gareth,” Sidney pointed to this.

“Clothe me,” his charge said in sullen contempt, “and be quick about it.”

He was putting his socks on last when Gareth pulled his feet loose hastily and said, “Why don’t you lick my toes for a stretch, go on . . . Go on, I won’t tell on you, murderer . . .”

Sidney blinked, coughed, and then his mouth fell over the toes, which had an odor about them like preserved cherries.

After a few moments of these caresses Gareth kicked him violently away.

“No brother of mine is going to empty used chamber pots!”

Vance had hurled this statement at Sidney as his last word on the subject during their two-­hour bickering and quarreling over “everything,” and then had rushed out the door, and driven off in Dr. Ulric’s new car.

It had never occurred to Sidney that his brother would go straight to Mrs. Vaisey’s house.

Vance had never known himself to be so angry, but he knew from some experience of his flying off the handle in the past that it would have been wiser to have waited until morning before taking any “action”; and even as he was ringing the doorbell—it was ten-­thirty at night—he realized he was probably making a bad mistake.

Late as it was, Mrs. Vaisey was only just then taking her supper, seated alone at the end of an eighteen-­foot dining table illuminated now only by a single tall drooping white candle. She did not rise or, indeed, speak when Vance was ushered in by Peter Damon, who had announced the visitor’s name and that the purpose of his visit was urgent.

“Sidney is all right, I hope,” she greeted him with alarm, for she could only construe his coming as being dictated by bad news.

When her visitor still failed to speak, she rose:

“There’s nothing seriously wrong, is there?”

“I had no idea you would be dining, Mrs. Vaisey. . . . You’ll have to forgive me coming so late too . . . I will leave and return.” He moved toward the door.

“But what is your news?” She was convinced by now something terrible had happened to her new “hope.”