“Good morning, monsieur,” she cried gaily. “Have you a bad conscience that you sleep so lightly and arise so early?”
“Mademoiselle,” said I gravely, bending low over her cool brown fingers, and noticing that they trembled, “I have been watching the signals from yonder ship.”
The brown fingers were withdrawn nervously.
“They were quite unintelligible to me,” I continued, “but I readily infer that your brother has returned and is on shipboard.”
A strange look—was it relief?—passed over her face. Then she nodded her dark head as if in frankest acquiescence.
“Allow me to say at once that I must try to capture him, but that I earnestly hope that I shall not be so unfortunate as to succeed.”
At this her eyes softened upon me. Never had I seen anything, in life or in dream, so beautiful as the smile upon her lips. But I went on: “My men will patrol the coast; but they are few, and I cannot, of course, prevent your messengers eluding their vigilance and communicating with Monsieur le Fevre. I am glad I cannot prevent it. I doubt not you will warn him that all this neighbourhood is strictly watched. My men would at once recognise him, if they saw him, from the descriptions they have had.”
Then, as I watched her face, my restraint was shaken. The love which I had not till that day let myself realise laid mighty grasp upon me. The long-chained passion crept into my voice, and it changed, trembling, as I continued:
“Oh, you can prevent him falling into our hands. I beseech you let not that evil come upon me that your brother should be my prisoner.”
“Thank you, monsieur,” she said very simply, putting her hand in mine with a confidence like a child’s. Her eyes searched my very heart for a second. “I think, with such assistance, we can elude your vigilance, monsieur.”
But on the instant her look changed to one of the deepest gravity. As I have so often thought of that look since, it was a surrender in part, in part a sacrament.
“The South Cove at noon,” she said, with a sort of sob, and flushed and ran hastily into the house.
For a moment or two I stood staring after her in utter bewilderment. The dominant feeling, which sent great gushes of light and warmth through heart and brain and nerve, was that she loved me, that she had revealed herself to me on a swift, inexplicable impulse. This set me reeling in a kind of intoxication. But underneath, clamouring harshly to be heeded, was the problem she had thrust upon me. She had forced me to know just what I had striven so desperately not to know. For the moment, however, I did not think. I simply let myself feel; and, turning mechanically, I walked in a daze down the winding road through the rose garden.