“I have found it! I have found it!” she managed to articulate, wild-eyed, laughing and screaming together, and rushing with the box to the astonished Ducie, she placed it in his hands. “And, oh, the house is full of robbers!”
The disheveled group stood as if petrified for a moment, the moonbeams falling through the open doorway, giving the only illumination. But the light, although pale and silvery, was distinct; it revealed the intent half-dressed figures, the starting eyes, the alert attitudes, and elicited a steely glimmer from more than one tense grasp, for this is preëminently the land of the pistol-pocket. The fact was of great deterrent effect in this instance, for if the vistas of shadow and sheen within the empty suites of apartments gave upon this picture of the coterie, wrought in gray and purple tones and pearly gleams, it was of so sinister a suggestion as to rouse prudential motives. There were ten stalwart men of the steamboat’s passengers here, and the marauders numbered but five.
A sudden scream from the ladies’ dormitory broke the momentary pause. A man, nay, three or four men, had rushed past the windows on the portico.
“I hear them now!” cried Hildegarde Dean; “they are crashing through the shrubbery.”
“Nonsense,” Floyd-Rosney brusquely exclaimed. “There are no robbers here.” Then to his wife, “Is this hysteria, Paula, or are you spoiling for a sensation?”
She did not answer. She did not heed. She still stood in the attitude of putting the heavy box into Adrian Ducie’s grasp and while he mechanically held it she looked at him, her eyes wild and dilated, shining full of moonlight, still exclaiming half in sobs, half in screams, “I have found it! I have found it!--the Duciehurst treasure.”
Floyd-Rosney cast upon the casket one glance of undisciplined curiosity. Then his proclivity for the first place, the title rôle, asserted itself. He did not understand his wife. He did not believe that she had found aught of value, or, indeed, that there was aught of value to find. Beyond and above his revolt of credulity was his amazement at his wife’s insurgent spirit, so signally, so unprecedentedly manifested on this trip. He connected it with the presence of Adrian Ducie, which in point of facial association was the presence of his twin brother, her former lover. The mere surmise filled him with absolute rage. His tyrannous impulse burned at a white heat. A wiser man, not to say a better man, would have realized the transient character of the incident, her natural instinct to assert herself, to be solicitous of the judgment of the Ducies on her position, to seem no subservient parasite of the rich man, but to hold herself high. Thus she had resented too late the absolute dominion her husband had taken over her, and she felt none the lack of the manner of consideration, even though fictitious, which was her due as his wife.
