Lord Saltash laughed again. "I could sell him up--lock, stock, and barrel--to-morrow if I wanted."
She started. "Charlie! You don’t mean that!"
He looked at her with a gleam of mischief in his queer eyes. "Of course I do! ’The Anchor’ belongs to me, and all that is in it. It’s mortgaged for considerably more than its value, and I hold the mortgage. Did he never mention that detail?"
He stretched out a lazy hand. "It’s all right, Queen Maud. He is quite safe so long as he behaves decently to you and yours. He’s something of a brute-beast, I believe? Well, if he needs any salutary correction, you must let me know."
His ugly face laughed into hers; the light in his eyes was half-mocking, half-tender.
"It’s good to know that there may be something left that I can yet do for you," he said. "The worthy Jake may have a stout right arm, but he is not a Croesus."
He turned the conversation in his easy, well-bred fashion, and her embarrassment died down. But the carelessly uttered information dwelt persistently in her mind, even though she found herself talking of indifferent things. It was strange that all her affairs should be so completely--and it seemed so irrevocably--under the direct control of this man whom she had once so resolutely driven out of her life. Fate or chance had thrown them together again. A little secret tremor went through her. What would come of it?
She had not attempted to touch the hand he had stretched forth to her. It had fastened upon the arm of the chair in which she sat and rested there. Presently she looked down at it, her eyes attracted by the gleam of the ring upon it.
"Your own," murmured Saltash. "Violets blue as your eyes!"
He moved his hand in the firelight, and the sapphire shone in the midst of the diamonds like a deep blue flame in the heart of a leaping fire. He drew a little nearer to her.
"You sent it back to me," he said. "I have worn it--like a faithful widower--ever since."
Her heart contracted with an odd little pain. "Don’t wax sentimental, Charlie!" she pleaded, with a difficult smile.
"Would you prefer me heartless?" he said; but he withdrew his hand, and the sapphire burned no more.
They began to talk again upon ordinary topics, and the conversation turned upon the Graydown Steeplechase Races of the morrow. Two horses from the Burchester Stud were running.