The group of men at the door, looking laughingly after them, might readily have discriminated the moment of the disclosure of the discovery of the Duciehurst treasure with the release of the mortgage foreclosed so long ago. Randal paused abruptly, facing round upon his brother and apparently listening in stunned amaze. They were too distant for words to be distinguished, but his voice came on the air, loud and excited, in eager questioning. He was, evidently, about to turn within the house, possibly to have the evidence of his eyes to the intendment and validity of this paper, when Adrian, by a gesture, checked him. The fog was beginning to lift, and the figures of the two men were imposed on a vista of green, where the sunlight in a delicate clarity after the rains, in a refined glister of matutinal gold, was beginning to send long glinting beams among the glossy foliage of the magnolias, and to light with reverent tapering shafts the solemn aisles of the weeping willows where the tombstones reared unchanged their mortuary memorials, unmindful of sheen or shadow, of fair weather or foul, even of time, as the years came and went, a monition only of death and a prophecy of eternity.
“There is one thing I must tell you, Ran,” Adrian said, laying both hands on his brother’s shoulders.
Randal threw up his head, excited, expectant, apprehensive.
“_She_ is here,--one of the passengers of the _Cherokee Rose_.”
“She?” exclaimed Randal in blank mystification. “Who?”
Adrian was embarrassed. It seemed as if even an old love could hardly be of so sluggish a divination,--as if Randal must have probed his meaning. He reflected that it might be some keenly sensitive consciousness that could not yet bear the open recognition of the facts. Between them the subject of the sudden jilting had never been mentioned, save in Randal’s one letter apprising his brother that the engagement was off, by reason of the lady’s change of mind, which came, indeed, later than the item in the Paris journals, chronicling news of interest to Americans sojourning abroad, and giving details of a new betrothal in a circle of great wealth and position. He himself had never known such frenzy of emotion, of rage, and humiliation, and compassion, and pride. The event had racked him with vicarious woe. It had dealt him a wound that would not heal, but now and again burst into new and undreamed of phases of anguish. Even yet he shrank from taking her name on his lips--and to Randal himself, of all people. Yet Randal must be told,--he must not meet her unaware. The pause of indecision continued so long as they stood thus, Adrian’s hands on his brother’s shoulders, that Randal’s eyes dilated with a surprise obviously unaffected. He lifted his own hands to his brother’s elbows, and thus facing each other he said: “What of it? I am in a hurry,--I want to see that release. Who is this ‘she’?”