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MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY

MIRANDA

OF THE BALCONY

A STORY

BY

A. E. W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE BUCKLER," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1899

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1899,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY

CHAPTER I

[IN WHICH A SHORT-SIGHTED TAXIDERMIST FROM TANGIER MAKES A DISCOVERY UPON ROSEVEAR]

The discovery made a great stir amongst the islands, and particularly at St. Mary's. In the square space before the Customs' House, on the little stone jetty, among the paths through the gorse of the Garrison, it became the staple subject of gossip, until another ship came ashore and other lives were lost. For quit2e apart from its odd circumstances, a certain mystery lent importance to Ralph Warriner. It transpired that nearly two years before, when on service at Gibraltar, Captain Warriner of the Artillery had slipped out of harbour one dark night in his yacht, and had straightway disappeared; it was proved that subsequently he had been dismissed from the service; and the coroner of St. Mary's in a moment of indiscretion let slip the information that the Home Office had requested him to furnish it with a detailed history of the facts. The facts occurred in this sequence.

At seven o'clock of a morning in the last week of July, the St. Agnes lugger which carries the relief men to and fro between the Trinity House barracks upon St. Mary's and the Bishop Lighthouse in the Atlantic, ran alongside of St. Mary's pier. There were waiting upon the steps, the two lighthouse men, and a third, a small rotund Belgian of a dark, shiny countenance which seemed always on the point of perspiring. He was swathed in a borrowed suit of oilskins much too large for him, and would have cut a comical figure had he not on that raw morning looked supremely unhappy and pathetic. M. Claude Fournier was a taxidermist by profession and resided at Tangier; he was never backward in declaring that the evidences of his skill decorated many entrance-halls throughout Europe; and some three weeks before he had come holiday-making alone to the islands of Scilly.

He now stood upon the steps of the pier nervously polishing his glasses as the lugger swung upwards and downwards on the swell. He watched the relief men choose their time and spring on board, and just as Zebedee Isaacs, the master of the boat, was about to push off with his boat-hook, he nerved himself to speak.

"I go with you to the Bishop, is it not?"

Isaacs looked up in surprise. He had been wondering what had brought the little man out in this dress and on this morning.

"There'll be a head-wind all the way," he said discouragingly, "and wi' that and a heavy ground sea we'll be brave an' wet before we reach the Bishop, brave an' wet."

"I do not mind," replied M. Fournier. "For the sea, I am dévot;" but his voice was tremulous and belied him.

Isaacs shook his head.

"It's not only the sea. Look!" And he stretched out his arm. A variable fog rolled and tumbled upon a tumbling wilderness of sea. "I'ld sooner have two gales lashed together than sail amongst these islands in a fog. I'ld never go to-day at all, but the boat's more'n three weeks overdue."

Indeed, as M. Fournier looked seawards, there was no glimpse of land visible. A fortnight of heavy weather had been followed by a week of fog which enveloped the islands like a drenched blanket. Only to-day had it shown any signs of breaking, and the St. Agnes lugger was the first boat, so far as was known, to run the hazard of the sea. It is true that two days before one man had run in to the bar of Tregarthen's Hotel and told how he had stood upon the top of the Garrison and had looked suddenly down a lane between two perpendicular walls of mist, and had seen the water breaking white upon Great Smith Rock, and in the near distance an open boat under a mizzen and a jib, beating out through the heavy swell towards the west. But his story was in no wise believed.

To all of Isaacs's objections M. Fournier was impervious, and he was at last allowed to embark.

"Now!" cried Zebedee Isaacs, as the lugger rose. M. Fournier gave a pathetic look backwards to the land, shut his eyes and jumped. Isaacs caught and set him upon the floor of the boat, where he stood clutching the runners. He saw the landing-steps dizzily rush past him up to the sky like a Jacob's ladder, and then as dizzily shut downwards below him like a telescope.

The boat was pushed off. It rounded the pier-head and beat out on its first tack, across the Road. M. Fournier crouched down under the shelter of the weather bulwark.

"As for the sea I am dévot," he murmured, with a watery smile.

In a little the boat was put about. From Sour Milk Ledge it was sailed on the port tack towards Great Minalto, and felt the wind and felt the sea. It climbed up waves till the red lug-sail swung over M. Fournier's head like a canopy; and on the downward slope the heavy bows took the water with a thud. M. Fournier knelt up and clung to the stays. At all costs he must see. He stared into the shifting fog at the rollers which came hopping and leaping towards him; and he was very silent and very still, as though the fascination of terror enchained him.

On the third tack, however, he began to resume his courage. He even smiled over his shoulder towards Zebedee Isaacs at the tiller.

"As for the sea," he began to say, "I am--" But the statement, which he was not to verify on this day, ended in a shriek. For at that moment a great green wave hopped exultingly over the bows, and thenceforward all the way to the Bishop the lugger shipped much water.

M. Fournier's behaviour became deplorable. As Isaacs bluntly and angrily summarised it, "he lay upon the thwarts and screeched like a rook;" and in his appeals to his mother he was quite conventionally French.

He made no attempt to land upon the Lighthouse. The relief men were hoisted up in the sling, the head-keeper and one of his assistants were lowered, and the lugger started upon its homeward run before the wind. The fog thickened and lightened about them as they threaded the intricate channels of the western islands. Now it was a thin grey mist, parting here and there in long corridors, driven this way and that, twirling in spires of smoke, shepherded by the winds; now again it hung close about them an impenetrable umber, while the crew in short quick tones and gestures of the arms mapped out the rocks and passages. About them they could hear the roar of the breaking waves and the rush of water up slabs and over ledges, and then the "glumph glumph" as the wave sucked away. At times, too, the fog lifted from the surface and hung very low, massed above their heads, so that the black hillocks of the islets stood out in the sinister light like headstones of a cemetery of the sea, and at the feet of them the water was white like a flash of hungry teeth.

It was at one such moment, when the boat had just passed through Crebawethan Neck, that M. Fournier, who had been staring persistently over the starboard bulwark, suddenly startled the crew.

"There's a ship on shore. Tenez--look!" he cried. "There, there!" And as he spoke the mist drove between his eyes and what he declared that he saw.

Zebedee Isaacs looked in the direction.

"On Jacky's Rock?" he asked, nodding towards a menacing column of black rock which was faintly visible.

"No, no--beyond!--There!" And M. Fournier excitedly gesticulated. He seemed at that moment to have lost all his terror of the sea.

"On Rosevear, then," said the keeper of the lighthouse, and he strained towards Rosevear.

"I see nothing," he said, "and--"

"There's nothing to see," replied Isaacs, who did not alter his course.

"But it's true," exclaimed the little Belgian. "I see it no more myself. But I have seen it, I tell you. I have seen the mast above the island--"

"You!" interrupted Isaacs, with a blunt contempt; "you are blind!" And M. Fournier, before anyone could guess his intention, flung himself upon Isaacs and jammed the tiller hard over to port. The boat came broadside to the wind, heeled over, and in a second the water was pouring in over the gunwale. Zebedee wrenched the main sheet off the pin, and let the big sail fly; another loosed the jib. The promptitude of these two men saved the boat. It ran its head up into the wind, righted itself upon its keel, and lay with flapping sails and shivered.

Isaacs without a word caught hold of M. Fournier and shook him like a rat; and every man of the crew in violent tones expounded to the Belgian the enormity of his crime. Fournier was himself well-nigh frantic with excitement. He was undaunted by any threats of violence; neither the boat, nor the sea, nor the crew had any terrors for him.

"There is a ship!" he screamed. "The fog was vanished--just for a second it was vanished, and I have seen it. There may be men alive on that rock--starving, perishing, men of the sea like you. You will not leave them. But you shall not!" And clinging to the mast he stamped his feet. "But you shall not!"

"And by the Lord he's right," said the lighthouse-keeper, gravely--so gravely that complete silence at once fell upon the crew. One man stood up in the bows, a second knelt upon the thwarts, a third craned his body out beyond the stern, and all with one accord stared towards Rosevear. The screen of haze was drawn aside, and quite clear to the view over a low rock, rose the mast and tangled cordage of a wreck.

The sheets were made fast without a word. Without a word, Zebedee Isaacs put the boat about and steered it into the Neck between Rosevear and Rosevean. As they passed along that narrow channel, no noise was heard but the bustle of the tide. For at the western end they saw the bows of a ship unsteadily poised upon a ledge. There was a breach amidships, the stern was under water, only the foremast stood; and nowhere was there any sign of life.

Isaacs brought the boat to in a tiny creek, some distance from the wreck.

"We can land here," he said, and the lighthouse-keeper and Fournier stepped ashore.

On the instant that quiet, silent islet whirred into life and noise. So startling was the change that M. Fournier jumped backwards while his heart jerked within him.

"What's that?" he cried, and then laughed as he understood. For a cloud of puffins, gulls, kittiwakes and shearwaters whirled upwards from that nursery of sea-birds and circled above his head, their cries sounding with infinite melancholy, their wings flickering like silver in that grey and desolate light.

"It's so like your Robinson Crusoe," said M. Fournier.

"It is more like our islands of Scilly," said the lighthouse-keeper, as he looked towards the wreck.

They climbed over the low rocks and walked along the crown of the island towards the wreck. There was no tree or shrub upon the barren soil, only here a stretch of sandy grass, there a patch of mallows--mallows of a rusty green and whitened with salt of the sea. In the midst of one such patch they came upon the body of a man. He was dressed in a pilot coat, sea boots and thick stockings drawn over his trousers to the hips, and he lay face downwards with his head resting upon his arms in a natural posture of sleep.

Fournier stood still. The lighthouse-keeper walked forward and tapped the sleeper upon the shoulder. But the sleeper did not wake. The lighthouse man knelt down and gently turned the man over upon his back; as he did so, or rather just before he did so, Fournier turned sharply away with a shudder. When the sailor was lying upon his back, the keeper of the lighthouse started with something of a shudder too. For the sailor had no face.

The lighthouse man drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gently covered the head. It seemed almost as if Fournier had been waiting, had been watching, for this action. For he turned about immediately and stood by the lighthouse-keeper's side. Above the lonely islet the sea-birds circled and called; on the sea the mist was now no more than a gauze, and through it the glow of the sun was faintly diffused.

"Strange that, isn't it?" said the lighthouse-keeper, in a hushed voice. "The sea dashed him upon the rocks and drew him down again and threw him up again until it got tired of the sport, and so tossed him here to lie quietly face downwards amongst the mallows like a man asleep."

Then he sat back upon his heels and measured the distance between the mallows and the sea with some perplexity upon his forehead--and the perplexity grew.

"It's a long way for the sea to have thrown him," he said, and as Fournier shifted restlessly at his side, he looked up into his face. "Good God, man, but you look white," he said.

"The sight is terrible," replied Fournier, as he wiped his forehead.

The lighthouse-keeper nodded assent.

"Yes, it's a terrible place, the sea about these western islands," he said. "Did you ever hear tell that there are sunken cities all the way between here and Land's End, the sunken cities of Lyonnesse? Terrible sights those cities must see. I often think of the many ships which have plunged down among their chimneys and roof-tops--perhaps here a great Spanish galleon with its keel along the middle of a paved square and its poop overhanging the gables, and the fishes swimming in and out of the cabins through the broken windows; perhaps there a big three-decker like Sir Cloudesley Shovel's, showing the muzzles of her silent guns; or a little steam-tramp of our own times, its iron sides brown with rust, and God knows what tragedy hidden in its tiny engine-room. A terrible place--these islands of Scilly, dwelling amongst the seas, as the old books say--dwelling amongst the seas."

He bent forward and unfastened the dead sailor's pilot jacket. Then he felt in his pocket and drew out an oilskin case. This he opened, and Fournier knelt beside him.

There were a few letters in the case, which the two men read through. They were of no particular importance beyond that they were headed "Yacht The Ten Brothers," and they were signed "Ralph Warriner," all of them except one. This one was a love-letter of a date six years back. It was addressed to "Ralph," and was signed "Miranda."

"Six years old," said the lighthouse-keeper. "For six years he has carried that about with him, and now it will be read out in court to make a sorry fun for people whom he never knew. That's hard on him, eh? But harder on the woman."

At the words, spoken in a low voice, M. Fournier moved uneasily and seemed to wince. The lighthouse-keeper held the letter in his hands and thoughtfully turned over its pages.

"I have a mind to tear it up, but I suppose I must not." He returned the papers to the oilskin case, and going back to the boat called for two of the crew to carry the body down. "Meanwhile," said he to Fournier, "we might have a look at 'The Ten Brothers.'"

They could not approach the bows of the ship, but overlooked them from a pinnacle of rock. There was, however, little to be remarked.

"She is an old boat, and she has seen some weather from the look of her," said the lighthouse-keeper. That, indeed, was only to be expected, for "The Ten Brothers" had been a trader before Ralph Warriner bought her, and two years had elapsed between the night when he slipped from Gibraltar Harbour, and the day when this boat came to its last moorings upon Rosevear.

The mist cleared altogether towards sunset. The sun shone out from the edge of the horizon a ball of red fire, and the lugger ferried the dead body back to St. Mary's over a sea which had the colour of claret, and through foam ripples which sparkled like gold.

The Miranda who wrote the love-letter was Miranda Warriner, Ralph Warriner's wife. Miranda Bedlow she had been at the date which headed the letter. She was living now at Ronda in the Andalusian hills, a hundred miles from Algeciras and Gibraltar, and had lived there since her husband's disappearance. To Ronda the oilskin case was sent. She heard the news of her Ralph's death with a natural sense of solemnity, but she was too sincere a woman to assume a grief which she could not feel. For her married life had been one of extraordinary unhappiness.

CHAPTER II

[PRESENTS THE HERO IN THE UNHEROIC ATTITUDE OF A SPECTATOR]

It was Lady Donnisthorpe who two years later introduced Luke Charnock to Mrs. Warriner. Lady Donnisthorpe was an outspoken woman with an untameable passion for match-making, which she indulged with the ardour and, indeed, the results of an amateur chemist. Her life was spent in mingling incompatible elements and producing explosions to which her enthusiasm kept her deaf, even when they made a quite astonishing noise. For no experience of reverses could stale her satisfaction when she beheld an eligible bachelor or maid walk for the first time into her parlour.

She had made Charnock's acquaintance originally in Barbados. He sat next her at a dinner given by the Governor of the Island, and took her fancy with the pleasing inconsistency of a boyish appearance and a wealth of experiences. He was a man of a sunburnt aquiline face, which was lean but not haggard, grey and very steady eyes, and a lithe, tall figure, and though he conveyed an impression of activity, he was still a restful companion. Lady Donnisthorpe remarked in him a modern appreciation of the poetry of machinery, and after dinner made inquiries of the Governor.

"He is on his way homewards from Peru," answered the latter. "He has been surveying for a railway line there during the last two years. What do you think of him?"

"I want to know what you think."

"I like him. He is modest without diffidence, successful without notoriety."

"What are his people?" asked Lady Donnisthorpe.

"I don't believe he has any. But I believe his father was a clergyman in Yorkshire."

"It would sound improper for a girl without visible relations to say that she was the daughter of a clergyman in Yorkshire, wouldn't it?" said her ladyship, reflectively. "But I suppose it's no objection in a man;" and in her memories she made a mark against Charnock's name. She heard of him again once or twice in unexpected quarters from the lips of the men who from East to West are responsible for the work that is done; and once or twice she met him, for she was a determined traveller. Finally, at Cairo, she sat next to Sir John Martin, the head partner of a great Leeds firm of railway contractors.

"Did you ever come across a Mr. Charnock?" she asked.

The head partner laughed.

"I did; I knew his father."

"It's a strange thing about Mr. Charnock," said she, "but one never hears anything of what he was doing before the last few years."

"Why not ask him?" said the North-countryman, bluntly.

"It might sound inquisitive," replied Lady Donnisthorpe, "and perhaps there's no need to, if you know."

"Yes, I know," returned Sir John, with a great deal of provoking amusement, "and, believe me, Lady Donnisthorpe, it's not at all to his discredit."

Lady Donnisthorpe began thereafter to select and reject possible wives for Charnock, and while still undecided, she chanced to pass one December through Nice. The first person whom she saw in the vestibule of the hotel was Luke Charnock.

"What in the world are you doing here?" she asked.

"Taking a week's holiday, Lady Donnisthorpe. I have been in Spain for the last two years, and shall be for the next nine months."

"In Spain?"

"I am making a new line between Cadiz and Algeciras."

"God bless the man, and I never thought of it!" exclaimed Lady Donnisthorpe. "I think you will do," she added, looking him over, and nodding her head.

"I hope so," replied Charnock, cheerfully. "It's a big lift for me."

"In a way, no doubt," agreed her ladyship. "Though, mind you, the land isn't what it was."

"The railway will improve it," said Charnock.

They happened to be talking of different subjects. Lady Donnisthorpe pursued her own.

"Then you won't be in England for a year?" she said regretfully.

"The company building the line is an English one," replied Charnock. "I shall have to see the directors in June. I shall be in London then."

"Then you must come and see me. Write before you leave Spain. Promise!" said Lady Donnisthorpe, who was now elated.

Charnock promised, and that day Lady Donnisthorpe wrote to her cousin, Miranda Warriner, at Ronda, who was now at the end of the first year of her widowhood, and of the third year of her ridiculous seclusion at that little hill-town of Spain. Miranda was entreated, implored, and commanded to come to London in May. There was the season, there was Miranda's estate in Suffolk, which needed her attention. Miranda reluctantly consented, and so Lady Donnisthorpe was the instrument by which Charnock and Mrs. Warriner became acquainted. But the foundations of that acquaintanceship were laid without her ladyship's agency, and indeed without the knowledge of either Charnock or Miranda.

A trifling defect in the machinery of a P. and O. boat began it. The P. and O. stayed for four days at Aden to make repairs, and so Charnock had four days to wait at Gibraltar before he could embark for England. He did not, however, spend more than two of those four days at Gibraltar, but picking up a yellow handbill in the lounge of the hotel, he obeyed its advice, and crossing the sunlit straits early the next morning saw the jealous hills about Tangier unfold and that cardboard city glitter down to the sea.

He was rowed ashore to the usual accompaniment of shouts and yells by a villainous boat's crew of Arabs. A mob of Barbary Jews screamed at him on the landing-stage, and then a Moorish boy with a brown roguish face who was dressed in a saffron jellabia, pushed his way forwards and in a conversational voice said, "You English? God damn you, give me a penny!"

Charnock hired that boy, and under his guidance sauntered through Tangier where the East and the West rub shoulders, where the camel snarls in the Sôk with an electric arc-lamp for a night-light, and all the races and all the centuries jostle together in many colours down the cobbles of its narrow streets. Charnock was shown the incidentals of the Tangier variety entertainment: the Basha administering more or less justice for less or more money at his Palace gate; the wooden peep-hole of the prison where the prisoners' hands come through and clutch for alms; a dancing-room where a Moorish woman closely veiled leaned her back against a Tottenham Court Road chest of drawers under a portrait of Mrs. Langtry, and beat upon a drum while another stamped an ungainly dance by the light of a paraffin lamp; and coming out again into the sunlight, Charnock cried out, "Hamet, take me somewhere where it's clean, and there's no din, and there are no smells."

Hamet led the way up the hills, and every now and then, as he passed a man better dressed than his fellows he would say in a voice of awe:

"That's a rich." He invariably added, "He's a Juice."

"Look here, Hamet," said Charnock, at length, "can't you show me a rich who isn't a Jew?"

"These are the loryers," observed Hamet, after the fashion of the March Hare when posed with an inconvenient question. He pointed to a number of venerable gentlemen in black robes who sat in wooden hutches open to the street. "I will show you," he continued, "a Moor who was the richest man in all Tangier."

The pair walked up out of the town towards the Mazan, and came to a lane shadowed by cedars and bordered with prickly pears. Here the resounding din of the streets below was subdued to a murmurous confusion of voices, from which occasionally a sharp cry would spirt up clear into the air like a jet of water. Only one voice was definite and incessant, and that voice came down to them from the trees higher up the lane--a voice very thin, but on that hot, still afternoon very distinct--a voice which perpetually quavered and bleated one monotonous invocation.

"Hassan Akbar," said Hamet.

The invocation became articulate as they ascended. "Allah Beh!" the voice cried, and again "Allah Beh!" and again, until the windless air seemed to vibrate with its recurrence.

They came upon the Moor who uttered this cry at the gate of the Moorish cemetery. A white, stubbly beard grew upon his chin and lips, but his strength was not diminished by his years, and with every movement of his body the muscles beneath the tough skin of his bare legs worked like live things. He sat cross-legged in the dust with a filthy sack for his only garment; he was blind, and his eyes stared from their red sockets covered with a bluish film as though the colours of the eyeballs had run.

"Allah Beh!" he cried, swaying his body backwards and forwards with the regularity of an automaton and an inimitable quickness. He paid no heed whatever to Charnock and the boy as they halted beside him. "Allah Beh!" he cried, and his chest touched the cradle of his knees. He marked the seconds with the pendulum of his body; he struck them with his strident invocation.

"He was the richest man in Tangier," said Hamet, and he told Hassan Akbar's story as though it was an affair of every day. Hassan had not secured the protection of any of the European Legations. He had hoped to hide his wealth by living poorly, and though he owned a house worth three thousand dollars in Tangier, he did not dwell in it. But no concealments had availed him. Someone of his familiars had told, and no doubt had made his profit from the telling. The Basha had waited his opportunity. It came when blindness left Hassan defenceless. Then the Basha laid hands upon him, forced him to give up the gains of a lifetime's trade, and so cast him out penniless to beg for copper flouss at the gate of the cemetery.

"And Europe's no more than seven miles away," cried Charnock. Even where he stood he could see the laughing water of the Straits, and beyond that, the summit of Gibraltar. "Who was it that told?" he asked.

"That is not known."

Charnock dropped some money into the blind man's lap, but Hassan did not cease from his prayer to thank him.

"He is very strong," said Hamet, who saw nothing strange in the story he had told. "He swings like this all day from seven in the morning to five at night. He never stops." And at that moment, upon the heels of Hamet's words, as though intentionally to belie them, Hassan Akbar suddenly arrested the motion of his body and suddenly ceased from his pitiable cry.

His silence and immobility came with so much abruptness that Charnock was fairly startled. Then Hamet held up a finger, and they both listened. Maybe the blind man was listening too, but Charnock could not be certain. His face was as blind as his eyes, and there was no expression in the rigid attitude of his body.

Charnock heard a faint sound higher up the lane. The sound became louder and defined itself. It was the slap-slap of a pair of Moorish slippers. Charnock drew Hamet back by the trunk of a tree, which sheltered them both from the view of anyone who came down the hill. He left the lane free, and into the open space there came a man who wore the dress of a Moor of wealth, serwal, chamir, farajia, and haik, spotless and complete. In figure he was slight and perhaps a trifle under the middle height, and the haik was drawn close over his forehead to shield him from the sun.

Hassan was seated in the dust with the sun beating full upon his head. In front of him the newcomer stopped. "Peace be with you," he said, as Charnock, who had some knowledge of Arabic, understood. But the beggar made no answer, nor gave any sign that he heard. He sat motionless, impassive, a secret figure of stone.

The newcomer laughed lightly to himself, and the laughter, within view of the rags and misery of the once rich man, sounded unpleasant and callous. Hamet shifted a foot at Charnock's side, and Charnock, whose interest in this picturesque encounter was steadily growing, pressed a hand upon the boy's shoulder to restrain him.

The stranger, however, had noticed neither of the two spectators. He was still laughing softly to himself as he watched the beggar, and in a little he began to hum between his teeth a tune--a queer, elusive tune of a sweet but rather mournful melody; and it seemed to Charnock by some indefinable hint of movement that Hassan Akbar was straining his ears to catch and register that tune.

The stranger advanced to Hassan and dropped a coin in his lap. The coin was not copper, for it sparkled in the air as it fell. Then with another easy laugh he turned to go down into Tangier. But as he turned he saw Charnock watching him. On the instant his hand went to his hood and drew it close about his cheeks, but not before Charnock had seen a scared face flashed at him for a moment, and immediately withdrawn. The Moor went down the lane.

"Perhaps it was he who told?" said Charnock.

Hamet disagreed.

"He would not know. His beard was fair, so he comes from Fez." Charnock, too, had remarked that the man was fair-haired. But nevertheless this encounter of the rich Moor and the beggar remained in his thoughts, and he allowed his imagination lazily to fix a picture of it in his mind. Thus occupied, he walked through the cemetery, taking in that way a short cut to the Sôk. But he was not half-way across the cemetery when he turned sharply towards Hamet.

"Do you remember the tune the Moor hummed?"

Charnock's ear was slow to retain the memory of music. Hamet, however, promptly whistled the melody from beginning to end, while Charnock stood and took count of it.

"I shall have forgotten it to-morrow," said Hamet.

"I think now that I shall recollect it tomorrow," said Charnock, and he walked on.

But in a moment or two he stopped again as though some new perplexity was present to his mind.

"Hamet," he said, "before the Moor appeared at all, while his footsteps were still faint, certainly before he spoke, Hassan Akbar stopped his prayer, which you say he never stops. He knew then who was coming. At all events he suspected. How did he know? How did he suspect?"

"There is the Sôk," replied Hamet.

They had passed round the bend of the hill up which the cemetery slopes, and were come within view of the market-place. Charnock was puzzled by his unanswered question, and the question was forced to his notice again that afternoon, and with yet greater force.

It was market-day. Charnock beheld stretched out beneath him a great field, or rather a great plain, (for the grass was long since trampled into mud,) which curved down to the yellow sun-baked wall of the city, and whereon an innumerable throng, Negroes from Timbuctoo, Arabs, Jews, and Moors, in all manner of raiment, from rags to coloured robes, jostled and seethed, bawled and sweated, under a hot sun and in a brilliant air. Here an old hag screamed aloud the virtues of her merchandise, a few skinny onions and vegetables; there two men forced a passage with blows of their sticks, and behind them a stately train of camels brought in from the uplands their loads of dates. A Riffian sauntered by with an indifferent air, his silver-mounted gun upon his back, a pair of pistols in his belt, and a great coarse tail of hair swinging between his shoulders. He needed no couriers to prepare his way. At one spot a serpent-charmer thrust out his tongue, from which a snake was hanging by the fangs; at another a story-teller, vivid in narration, and of an extraordinary aptness in his gestures, held an audience enchained. From every side the din of human voices rose into the air, and to the din was added the snarling of camels, the braying of donkeys, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of oxen, and all manner of squeals and grunts, so that it seemed the whole brute creation had combined to make one discordant orchestra.

Into this Babel Charnock descended.

"Those are the shoemakers," said Hamet. He pointed to a cluster of tiny grimed gunny-bag tents in a corner of the highest part of the Sôk. In the doorways of the tents a few men sat cobbling; one or two wood fires crackled in the intervals between the tents; and in close proximity a dead mule took its last unsavoury sleep.

"Hassan Akbar sleeps in the mud near to the tents," continued Hamet. "Every evening he comes down to the Sôk, buys milk and bread from the shoemakers, and sleeps--"

"Near to that mule!" interrupted Charnock. "And he was the richest man in all Tangier."

A moment later there was shown to him the second picture which he was to carry away from Tangier. Down the Sôk, through the crowd, came the Moor, in his spotless robes, and a few yards behind him, striding swiftly and noiselessly, the blind gaunt beggar of the cemetery gate followed upon his trail. In and out amongst the shifting groups he threaded and wound, and never erred in his pursuit. The man in whose track he kept never spoke when all were shouting, yet Hassan never faltered. The sound of his footsteps was lost in a multitude of the like sounds, yet Hassan was somehow sensible of it, somehow to his ears it emerged distinct.

Charnock was amazed; in a way too he was chilled. It seemed uncanny that this sightless creature of the impassive face should be able to follow, follow, follow relentlessly, unswervingly, one silent man amongst the noisy hundreds. Charnock walked for a few yards by Hassan Akbar's side, keeping pace with him. Even with his eyes fixed upon the Moor in front, even though he saw his feet tread the ground, he could not distinguish his footfalls. How then could Hassan?

Tracker and Tracked passed from the Sôk under the archway of the gate, and Charnock dismissing Hamet walked down towards his hotel near the waterside. However, he missed his road. He turned through the horse market, descended the steep street, past the great Mosque, and walked along a narrow, crooked alley between blank and yellow walls, which ended in a tunnel beneath over-arching houses. Almost within the mouth of this tunnel there was a shop, or so it seemed, for a stuffed jackal swung above the door as a sign. Before this shop Charnock halted with a thrill of excitement. The door of the shop was shut, the unglazed window was shuttered. It was not on that account that Charnock stopped; but underneath the shuttered window, his head almost touching the sill, Hassan squatted on the cobbles fingering now and then a silver dollar.

Inside the door a bolt grated, the door opened, and a stout, undersized European appeared in the entrance, polished a pair of glasses, set them upon his nose, glanced up and down the street, closed the door behind him, and taking no heed whatever of the blind man under his window, walked briskly into the tunnel. He walked with a short, tripping, and jaunty step.

Charnock waited while the echo of it diminished and ceased, and the moment it had ceased he saw Hassan, without any hurry, without any sign of expectation or excitement, rise slowly to his feet and move along the house wall towards the door. His right elbow scraped the plaster; then his elbow touched nothing. He had come to the recess of the door, and he stopped.

It flashed upon Charnock that he had not heard the bolt again grate into its socket. The door was then only latched and--was Hassan's quarry behind its panels?

The affair had ceased to be a toy with which Charnock's imagination could idly play. He strode across the alley and planted himself face to face with Hassan. Hassan quietly and immediately murmured a request for alms and stretched out his left hand, a supple, corded hand, with long sinuous fingers, a hand of great strength. But as he spoke he drew within the recess of the door, and Charnock noticed his right hand steal up the panels feeling for the latch.

Made by this seemingly passionless and apathetic man, the secret movement shocked Charnock. It seemed to him at that moment so cold-blooded as to be almost inhuman.

"Look out!" he shouted through the door and in broad English, forgetting that the man for whom his warning was intended was a Moor. But the warning had its effect. There was a heavy blow upon the door, as though a man's shoulder lurched against it, and then the bolt grated into the socket. Hassan Akbar walked on repeating his prayer for alms, as if his hand had never for an instant stolen up the panel and felt for the latch.

Charnock, to make his warning the more complete, rapped on the door for admission, once, twice, thrice. But he got no answer. He leaned his ear to the panel. He could detect not so much as a foot stirring. Absolute silence reigned in that dark and shuttered room.

Charnock walked back to his hotel. On the way he passed the end of the pier, where he saw the little Frenchman bargaining with the owner of a felucca. His excitement gradually died down. It occurred to him that there might have been no grounds at all for any excitement. Hassan Akbar might have been following through the Sôk by mere accident. He might have tried the door in pursuit of nothing more than alms; and in a little the whole incident ceased to trouble his speculations. He crossed the Straits to Gibraltar the next morning, and waited there for two days until the P. and O. came in. It was on the P. and O. that he first fell in with Major Wilbraham.

CHAPTER III

[TREATS OF A GENTLEMAN WITH AN AGREEABLE COUNTENANCE, AND OF A WOMAN'S FACE IN A MIRROR]

Major Ambrose Wilbraham had embarked at Marseilles, and before the boat reached Gibraltar he had made the acquaintance of everyone on board, and had managed to exchange cards with a good many. The steamer was still within sight of Gibraltar when he introduced himself to Charnock with a manner of effusive jocularity to which Charnock did not respond. The Major was tall and about forty years of age. A thin crop of black hair was plastered upon his head; he wore a moustache which was turning grey; his eyebrows were so faultlessly regular that they seemed to have been stencilled on his forehead, and underneath them a pair of cold beady eyes counterfeited friendliness. Charnock could not call to mind that he had ever met a man on whom geniality sat with so ill a grace, or one whose acquaintance he less desired to improve.

Major Wilbraham, however, was not easily rebuffed, and he walked the deck by Charnock's side, talkative and unabashed.

Off the coast of Portugal the boat made bad weather, and she laboured through the cross-seas of the Bay under a strong south-westerly wind. Off Ushant she picked up a brigantine which Charnock watched from the hurricane deck without premonition, and indeed without more than a passing curiosity.

"Fine lines, eh, Charnock old fellow!" said a voice at his elbow.

The brigantine dipped her head into a roller, lifted it, and shook the water off her decks in a cascade of snow.

"I have seen none finer," answered Charnock, "except on a racing-yacht or a destroyer."

"She's almost familiar to me," speculated the Major.

"She reminds me of some boats I saw once at the West Indies," returned Charnock, "built for the fruit-trade, and so built for speed. Only they were schooners--from Salcombe, I believe. The Salcombe clippers they were called."

"Indeed!" said the Major, with a sharp interest, and he leaned forward over the rail. "Now I wonder what her name is."

Charnock held a pair of binoculars in his hand. He gave them to the Major. Wilbraham raised them to his eyes while the P. and O. closed upon the sailing-boat. The brigantine slid down the slope of a wave and hoisted her stern.

"The 'Tarifa,'" said the Major, and he shut up the binoculars. "What is her tonnage, do you think?"

"About three hundred, I should say."

"My notion precisely. Would it be of any advantage to alter her rig, supposing that she was one of the Salcombe schooners?"

"I should hardly think so," replied Charnock. "I rather understood that the schooners were noted boats."

"Ah, that's interesting," said Wilbraham, and he returned the binoculars. The steamer was now abreast of the brigantine, and in a little it drew ahead.

"By the way, Charnock, I shall hope to see more of you," resumed Major Wilbraham. "I haven't given you a card, have I?"

He produced a well-worn card-case.

"It's very kind of you," said Charnock, as he twirled the card between his forefinger and his thumb. "Don't you," he added, "find cards rather a heavy item in your expenses?"

Major Wilbraham laughed noisily.

"I take you, dear friend," he exclaimed, "I take you. But a friend in this world, sir, is a golden thread in a very dusty cobweb."

"But the friendship is rather a one-sided arrangement," rejoined Charnock. "For instance, the cards you give, Major Wilbraham, bear no address, the cards you receive, do." And while showing the card to his companion, he inadvertently dropped it into the sea.

Major Wilbraham blamed the negligence of a rascally printer, and made his way to the smoking-room.

The P. and O. boat touched at Plymouth the next morning, and landed both Major Wilbraham and Charnock. The latter remained in Plymouth for two days, and on the morning of the third day hired a hansom cab, and so met with the last of those incidents which were to link him in such close, strange ties with the fortunes of men and women who even in name were then utterly unknown to him.

A yellow handbill had led Charnock across the Straits to Tangier, and now it was nothing more serious than a draft upon Lloyd's bank which took him in a hansom cab through the streets of Plymouth. Spring was in the air; Charnock felt exceedingly light-hearted and cheerful. On the way he unconsciously worked his little finger into the eye of the brass bracket which juts inwards on each side of the front window at the level of the shoulder; and when the cab stopped in front of the bank he discovered that his finger was securely jammed.

Across the road he noticed a chemist's shop, and descending the steps of the bank a fair-haired gentleman of an agreeable countenance, who, quite appropriately in that town of sailors, had something of a nautical aspect.

"Sir," began Charnock, politely, as he leaned out of the window, "I shall be much obliged--"

To Charnock's surprise the good-natured gentleman precipitately sprang down the steps and began to walk rapidly away. Charnock was sufficiently human and therefore sufficiently perverse to become at once convinced that although there were others passing, this reluctant man was the only person in the world who could and must help him from his predicament.

So he leaned yet farther out of the cab.

"Hi, you sir!" he shouted, "you who are running away!"

The words had an electrical effect. The man of the agreeable countenance stopped suddenly, and so stood with his back towards Charnock while gently and thoughtfully he nodded his head. It seemed to Charnock that he might perhaps be counting over the voices with which he was familiar.

"Well," cried Charnock, who was becoming exasperated, "my dear sir, am I to wait for you all day?"

The street was populous with the morning traffic of a business quarter. Curious people stopped and attracted others. In a very few moments a small crowd would have formed. The stranger thereupon came slowly back to the hansom, showing a face which was no longer agreeable. He set a foot upon the step of the cab, and fixed a blue and watchful eye upon Charnock.

"I am afraid," said the latter, with severity, "that my first impression of you was wrong."

An indescribable relief was expressed by the other, but he spoke with surliness.

"You mistook me for someone else?"

"I mistook your disposition for something else," Charnock affably corrected. "I expected to find you a person of great good-nature."

"You hardly made such a point of summoning a perfect stranger," and here the blue eyes became very wary, "for no other reason than to tell him that."

"Certainly not," returned Charnock; "I would not trespass upon your time, which seems to be extremely valuable, without a better reason. But my finger is fixed, as you can see, in this brass ring, and I cannot withdraw it. So if you would kindly cross over to the chemist and buy me a pennyworth of vaseline, I shall be more than obliged." And with the hand which was free he felt in his pocket for a penny and held it out.

A look of utter incredulity showed upon the listener's face.

"Do you mean to tell me--" he blurted out.

"That I ask you to be my good Samaritan? Yes."

The stranger's face became suddenly vindictive. "Vaseline!" he cried.

"A pennyworth," said Charnock, again offering the penny.

The man of the agreeable countenance struck Charnock's hand violently aside, and the penny flew into a gutter. He stood up on the step and thrust his face, which was now inflamed with fury, into the cab.

"I tell you what," he cried, "you are a fair red-hotter, you are. Buy you vaseline! I hope your finger will petrify. I hope you'll just sit in that cab and rot away in your boots, until you have to ante up in kingdom come." He added expletives to his anathema.

"Really," said Charnock, "if I was a lady I don't think that I should like to listen to you any longer."

But before Charnock had finished the sentence, the good Samaritan, who was no Samaritan at all, had flung himself from the cab and was striding up the street.

"After all," thought Charnock, "I might just as well have driven across to the chemist, if I had only thought of it."

This he now did, got his finger free, cashed his draft, and took the train to London.

During this journey the discourteous stranger occupied some part of his thoughts. Between Charnock's eyes and the newspaper, against the red cliffs of Teignmouth, on the green of the home counties, his face obtruded, and for a particular reason. The marks of fear are unmistakable. The man whom he had called, had been scared by the call, nor had his fear quite left him when he had come face to face with Charnock. Set features which strove to conceal, and a brightness of the eye which betrayed emotion, these things Charnock remembered very clearly.

In London he dined alone at his hotel, and over against him the stranger's face bore him company. He went out afterwards into the street, and amidst the myriad ringing feet, was seized with an utter sense of loneliness, more poignant, more complete, than he had ever experienced in the waste places of the world. The lights of a theatre attracted him. He paid his money, took a seat in the stalls, and was at once very worried and perplexed. He turned to his neighbour, who was boisterously laughing.

"Would you mind telling me what this play is?" he asked.

"Oh, it's a musical comedy."

"I see. But what is it about?"

Charnock's neighbour scratched his head thoughtfully.

"I ought to remember," he said, "for I saw the piece early in the run."

Charnock went out, crossed a street, and came to another theatre, where he saw a good half of the tragedy of Macbeth. Thence he returned to his hotel and went to bed.

The hotel was one of many balconies, situated upon the Embankment. From the single window or his bedroom Charnock looked across the river to where the name of a brewery perpetually wrote itself in red brilliant letters which perpetually vanished. It was his habit to sleep not merely with his window open, but with the blinds drawn up and the curtains looped back, and these arrangements he made as usual before he got into bed.

Now, the looking-glass stood upon a dressing-table in the window, with its back towards the window-panes; and since the night was moonless and dark, this mirror, it should be remembered, reflected nothing of the room or its furniture, but presented only to the view of Charnock, as he lay in bed, a surface of a black sheen.

Charnock recurred to his adventure of the morning, and thus the abusive stranger was in his thoughts when he fell asleep. He figured also in his dreams.

For, after he had fallen asleep, a curtain was raised upon a fantastic revue of the past week. Hassan Akbar strode quickly and noiselessly behind his quarry, tracking him by some inappreciable faculty, not through the muddy Sôk, but across the polished floor of the ball-room in the musical comedy. Again Charnock shouted "Look out!" and the Moor with one bound leapt from the ball-room, which was now become a landing-stage, into a felucca. The crew of the felucca, it now appeared, was made up of Charnock, Lady Macbeth, and Hassan Akbar, and by casting lots with counters made of vaseline, Charnock was appointed to hold the tiller. This duty compelled extraordinary care, for the felucca would keep changing its rig and the bulk of its hull swelled and dwindled. At last, to Charnock's intense relief, the boat settled into a Salcombe clipper with the rig of a P. and O., but with immeasurably greater speed, so that within a very few seconds they sailed over a limitless ocean and anchored at Tangier. At once the crew entirely vanished. Charnock was not distressed, because he saw a hansom cab waiting for him at the Customs, though how the hansom was to pass up those narrow cobbled streets he could not think. That however was the driver's business.

"I hope your horse is good," said Charnock, springing into the cab.

"She comes of the great Red-hotter stock," replied the cabman, and lifting the trap in the roof he showered packets of visiting cards, which fell about Charnock like flakes of snow.

Charnock had not previously noticed that the cabman was Major Wilbraham.

The cab shot up the hill through the tunnel, past the closed shop. A figure sprang from the ground and thrust a face through the window of the cab. The man was in Moorish dress, but the face was the face of the abusive stranger of Plymouth--and all at once Charnock started up on his elbow, and in the smallest fraction of a second was intensely and vividly awake. There was no sound at all within the room. But in the black sheen of the mirror he saw a woman's face.

He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make--for five seconds perhaps the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him from the black mirror, lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished.

Charnock remained propped upon his elbow. A faint twilight from the stars crept timidly through the open window as though deprecating its intrusion. Charnock looked into the dark corners of the room, but nowhere did the darkness move. Nor could he hear any sound. Not even a board of the floor cracked, and outside the door there was no noise of a footstep on the stairs. Then from a great distance the jingle of a cab came through the open window to his ears with a light companionable lilt. Gradually the sound ceased, and again the silence breathed about him. Charnock struck a match and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after three.

Charnock lay back in his bed wondering. For he had seen that face once, he had once exchanged glances with those eyes, once only, six years ago, and thereafter had entirely forgotten the incident--until this moment. He had stopped for a night at Monte Carlo and had seen--the girl--yes, the girl, though it was a woman's face which had gleamed in the depths of his mirror--standing under the green shaded lamps in the big gambling-room. His attention, he now remembered, had been seized by the contrast between her amused indifference and the feverish haste of the gamblers about the table; between her fresh, clear looks and their heated complexions,--even between her frock of lilac silk and their more elaborate toilettes. The girl was entirely happy then, the red lips smiled, the violet eyes laughed. Why should her face appear to him now, after these years, and paled by this distress?

A queer fancy slipped into his mind--a fancy at the extravagance of which he knew very well he should laugh in the sane light of the morning, though he indulged it now--that somehow, somewhere, this woman needed help, and that it was thus vouchsafed to her, a stranger, to make her appeal to him in this way, which spared her the humiliation of making any appeal at all. Charnock fell asleep convinced that somehow, somewhere, he was destined to meet and know her. As he had foreseen, he laughed at his fancies in the morning, but nevertheless, he did meet her. It had, in fact, already been arranged that he should. For the face which he saw in the mirror was the face of Miranda Warriner.

CHAPTER IV

[TREATS OF THE FIRST MEETING BETWEEN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA]

Lady Donnisthorpe, with a sigh of relief, retired from her position at the head of the stairs, and catching Charnock in the interval between two dances:--

"You kept some dances free," she said, "didn't you? I want to introduce you to a cousin of mine, Miranda Warriner, because she lives at Ronda."

"At Ronda. Indeed?"

"Yes." Her ladyship added with a magnificent air of indifference, "She is a widow," and she led Charnock across the ball-room.

Miranda saw them approaching, noticed an indefinable air of expectation in Lady Donnisthorpe's manner, and smiled. A few excessively casual remarks concerning one Mr. Charnock, which Lady Donnisthorpe had dropped during the last few days, had not escaped the notice of Miranda, who was aware of her cousin's particular weakness. This was undoubtedly Mr. Charnock. She raised her eyes towards him, and had her ladyship been less fluttered, she might have remarked that Miranda's eyes lit up with a momentary sparkle of recognition.

"Mrs. Warriner--Mr. Charnock."

Lady Donnisthorpe effected the momentous introduction and felt immediately damped. She had not indeed expected that her two newest victims would at once and publicly embrace. But at all events she had decked out her ball-room as the sacrificial altar, and had taken care that a fitting company and cheerful music should do credit to the immolation. This tame indifference was less than she deserved.

Miranda, to whom Lady Donnisthorpe was looking, made the perfunctory dip of the head and smiled the perfunctory smile, and Charnock--why in the world did he not move or speak? Lady Donnisthorpe turned her eyes from Miranda to this awkward cavalier, and was restored to a radiant good-humour. "Dazzled," she said to herself, "absolutely dazzled!" For Charnock stood rooted to the ground and tongue-tied with amazement.

It was fortunate for Lady Donnisthorpe that at this point she thought it wise to withdraw. Otherwise she would surely have remarked an unmistakable look of disappointment which grew within Charnock's eyes and spread out over his face. Then the disappointment vanished, and as he compared programmes with Miranda, he recovered his speech.

Four dances must intervene before he could claim her, and Charnock was glad of the interval to get the better of his bewilderment. Here was the woman whom his mirror had shown to him! After all, his nocturnal fancy was fulfilled, or rather part of it, only part or it. He had met her, he was to dance with her. Some miracle had brought them together. From the corner by the doorway he watched Miranda, he remarked an unaffected friendliness in her manner towards her partners. Candour was written upon her broad white forehead and looked out from her clear eyes. He had no doubt it was fragrant too in her hair. There were heavy masses of that hair, as he knew very well from his mirror, but now the masses were piled and woven about her head with a cunning art, which to be sure they deserved. There was a ripple in her hair, too, which caught the light--a most taking ripple. Here was a woman divested of a girl's wiles and vanities. Charnock, without a scruple, aspersed all girls up to the age of say twenty-four, that he might give her greater praise.

He fell to wondering, not how it was that her face had appeared to him, nor by what miracle he was now enabled to have knowledge of her, but rather by what miracle of forgetfulness he had allowed her face, after he had seen it that one time six years ago, ever to slip from his thoughts, or her eyes after that one time he had exchanged a glance with them.

The whirl of the dance carried her by his corner. She swung past him with the lightest imaginable step, and he was suddenly struck through and through with a chilling apprehension that by some unconscionable maladroitness he would surely tread upon her toes.

At once he proceeded to count over the dances in which he had borne himself with credit. He had danced with Spanish women, he assured himself, and they had not objected. He was thus consoling himself when the time came for him to lead her out. And the touch of her hand in his, he remembers, turned him into a babbling idiot.

He recollects that they danced with great celerity; that they passed Lady Donnisthorpe, who smiled at him with great encouragement, and that he was dolefully humorous concerning Major Wilbraham and his exchanges of cards, though why Major Wilbraham should have thrust his bald head into the conversation, he was ever at a loss to discover. And then Miranda said, "Shall we stop?"

"Oh, I didn't, did I?" exclaimed the horror-stricken Charnock, as he looked downwards at her toes.

"No, you didn't," Miranda assured him with a laugh. "Do you usually?"

"No," he declared vehemently, "believe me, no! Never, upon my word! I have danced with Spanish women,--not at all,--no--no--no--no."

"Quite so," said Miranda.

And they laughed suddenly each to the other, and in a moment they were friends. Conversation came easily to their tongues, and underneath the surface of their light talk, the deeps of character called steadily like to like.

"I have seen you once before, Mrs. Warriner," said Charnock, as they seated themselves in an alcove of the room.

"Yes," she returned promptly, "at Monte Carlo, six years ago," and her face lost its look of enjoyment and darkened with some shadow from her memories. The change was, however, unremarked by Charnock.

"It seems strange," he said in an absent voice, "that we should meet first of all in a gambling-room, and the next time at a ball."

"Why?"

The question could not be answered. Charnock had a real but inexplicable feeling that Miranda and he should have met somewhere amidst the grandeur of open spaces, in the centre of the Sahara, and for the moment he forgot to calculate the effect of the sand upon Miranda's eyes. This feeling, however, he could hardly express at the present point of their acquaintanceship; and, indeed, he immediately ceased to be aware of it.

"Do you actually remember our meeting in that way six years ago?" he exclaimed. "How wonderful of you!"

"Why?" again asked Mrs. Warriner. "Why is it wonderful, since you remember it?"

"Ah, but I didn't remember it until"--he paused for a second or two--"until I saw your face in a looking-glass."

Miranda glanced at him in considerable perplexity. Then she said with a demure smile, "I have at times seen it there myself."

"No doubt," he replied with a glance at the cunning arrangement of her hair.

"My maid does that," said she, biting her lip.

"No doubt, but you sit in front of the glass at the time. You're in the room," he continued hastily; "but when I saw your face in my mirror, you couldn't be. I was in bed,--I mean,--let me tell you!" He stopped, overwhelmed with embarrassment. Miranda, with an air of complete unconsciousness, carefully buttoned her glove; only the glove was already buttoned, and her mouth twitched slightly at the corners.

"It was just a week ago to-day," Charnock began again. "I got home to my hotel late."

"Ah!" murmured Mrs. Warriner, as though the whole mystery was now explained to her.

"I assure you," he retorted with emphasis, "that I dined in the train and drank nothing more serious than railway claret."

"I made no accusation whatever," Miranda blandly remarked, and seemed very well pleased.

"After I had fallen asleep, I began to dream, but not about you, Mrs. Warriner; that's the strange feature of the business. It wasn't that I had been thinking of you that evening, or indeed, that I had ever been at all in the habit of thinking--" Again Charnock was utterly confused. "I don't seem to be telling the story with the best taste in the world, do I?" he said ruefully.

"Never mind," she said in a soothing voice.

"Of course, I could have turned it into a compliment," he continued. "Only I take it you have no taste for compliments, and I lack the experience to put them tactfully."

"For a novice," said she, "you seem to be doing very well." Charnock resumed his story. "I dreamt solely of people I had seen, and incidents I had witnessed during the last week, at Tangier and at Plymouth. I dreamed particularly of a man I quarrelled with at Plymouth, and I suddenly woke up and saw your face in the mirror."

"As you fancied."

"It was no fancy. It was no dream-face that I saw--dream-faces are always elusive. It was no dream-face, it was yours."

"Or one like mine."

"There cannot be two."

"For a novice," repeated Miranda, with a smile, "you are doing very well."

Charnock had watched her carefully while he told his story, on the chance that her looks, if not her lips, might give him some clue to the comprehension of his mysterious vision. But she had expressed merely an unconcerned curiosity and some amusement.

"Shall I explain your vision?" said she. "You must have seen me in London during the day: the recollection that you had seen me must have lain latent, so that when you woke up you saw me in your mirror and did not remember that you had seen me during the day."

"Were you at any theatre this day week?"

"No," said Miranda, after counting over the days.

"You did not see Macbeth that night?"

"No."

"Then it is impossible I should have seen you. For I came up from Plymouth only that afternoon. I drove from Paddington to my hotel; from the hotel I went to the theatre; from the theatre I walked back to the hotel. It is impossible."

"It is very strange," said Miranda, whose interest was increasing, and whose sense of amusement had vanished; for she saw that her companion was moved by something more than curiosity. It was evident to her from his urgent tones, from the eagerness of his face, that he had some hidden reason for his desire to fathom the mystery. It seemed to her that he nourished some intention, some purpose in the back of his mind, which depended for fulfilment upon whether or no there was any feasible solution.

"Tell me your dream," she said.

"It was the oddest jumble,--it had neither sense nor continuity. Moors figured in it, ships, Lady Macbeth, the Major with his card-case, and the stranger who swore at me through the cab-window at Plymouth. The phrases that man used came into it."

"What phrases?"

"I couldn't repeat to you the most eloquent. There were milder ones, however. He called me a fair red-hotter amongst other things," said Charnock, laughing at his recollections, "and expressed a wish that I might--well, sit in that cab until I ante'd up in kingdom come."

Miranda leaned back in her seat and opened and shut her fan. "He was a stranger to you, you say?"

"Quite."

"You are sure?"

"Quite."

"You had never seen him anywhere--anywhere? Think!"

Charnock deliberated for a few seconds. "Never anywhere," he replied.

There was a moment's silence. Mrs. Warriner gently fanned herself as she leaned back in the shadow of the alcove. "Describe him to me," she said quietly.

"A man of a slight figure, a little under the middle height, fair hair, bright blue eyes, an open, good-natured face, and I should say a year or so under forty. I took him to be a sailor."

The fan stopped. Miranda let it fall upon her lap. That was the only movement which she made, and from the shadow of the recess, she said: "There is no explanation."

Charnock drew a breath and leaned forward, his hands clasped, his elbows on his knees. It seemed he had been waiting for just that one sentence. As he sat now his face was in the light, and Miranda remarked a certain timidity upon it, as though now that he had heard the expected words, he dared not after all reply to them. He did not look towards her. He stared at the dancers, but with vacant eyes. He saw nothing of their jewels, or their coloured robes, or the flash of their silver feet, and the noise of their chatter sounded very dimly in his ears. He was quite occupied, indeed, with the hardihood of what he had it on his tongue's tip to say--when he had gained sufficient courage.

Miranda moved restlessly, unbuttoned a glove, drew it off her wrist unconsciously, and then was still as Charnock began to speak.

"Is there no explanation?" he asked. "I imagined one. You know how fancies come to one in the dark. That night I imagined one. I laughed at it the next morning, but now, since I have talked with you, I have been wondering whether by any miracle, it might be true. And if there's an infinitesimal chance that it's true, I think that I ought to tell you it, even though it may seem merely ridiculous, even though it may offend you. But I have lived for the most part of my time, since I was a man, in the waste places of the earth, and what may well be an impertinence--for we are only these few minutes acquainted--you will perhaps pardon on that account."

He received no encouragement to continue; on the other hand he received no warning to stop, for Miranda neither spoke nor moved. He did not look at her face lest he should read the warning there; but from the tail of his eye, he could see the fan, the white glove lying idle upon the black satin of her dress. The skirt hung from her knee to her foot without a stir in its folds, nor did her foot stir where it showed beneath the hem. She remained in a pose of most enigmatical quietude.

"The face which my mirror showed to me," he went on, "was your face, as I said; but in expression it was not your face as I see it to-night. It was very troubled, it was very pale; the eyes haunted me because of the pain in them, and because of--something else beside. It was a tortured face I saw, and the eyes seemed to ask--but to ask proudly--for help. Is it plain, the explanation which occurred to me?" His voice sank; he went on, slowly choosing every word with care, and speaking it with hesitation. "I imagined that out of all the millions of women in the world, here was one who needed help--my help, who was allowed to appeal to me for it, without, if you understand, making any appeal at all, and the explanation was not ... unpleasant ... to a man who lives much alone. In fact it has been so pleasant, and has become so familiar during this last week, that when I saw you to-night without a care, just as I saw you that night at Monte Carlo," and indeed it seemed to Charnock that the black dress she wore alone marked the passage of those six years,--"I am ashamed to say that I was disappointed."

"Yes," said Miranda. "I noticed the disappointment, but there's a simpler explanation of the troubled face than yours. You had been to Macbeth that evening; Lady Macbeth played a part in your dreams. What if Lady Macbeth lent her pallor and her distress to the face which you saw in your mirror?"

Charnock swung abruptly round towards her. It was not the explanation which surprised him, but the altered voice she used. And if her voice surprised him, he was shocked and startled by her looks. She was still leaning back in the shadow of the alcove, and her head rested against the dark wood-panels. She did not move when he looked towards her.

"My God," he said in a hushed and trembling whisper, and she gave no sign that she heard. She might have fainted, but that her eyes glittered out of the shadow straight and steadily into his. She might be dead from the whiteness of her face against the panels, but that her bosom rose and fell.

"What can I do?" he exclaimed.

"Hush!" she replied, and rose to her feet. "Here is Lady Donnisthorpe." She walked abruptly past him across the room to the open window. Charnock remained nailed to the ground, following her with his eyes. For in that alcove, leaning against the dark panels, he had seen not merely the features, but the expression on the features, he had seen exact in every detail the face which he had seen in the polished darkness of his mirror. The sheen of the dark polished panels helped the illusion. His fancy had come true, was transmuted into fact. Somewhere, somehow, he was to meet that woman. He had met her here and in this way, and her eyes and her face uttered her distress as with a piercing cry. Her eyes! The resemblance was perfect to the last detail. For Charnock ventured to surmise in them the same involuntary appeal which he had seen in the eyes that had looked out from his mirror. What then if the rest were true? What if his explanation was as true as the true facts which it explained? What if it was given to him and to her to stand apart from their fellows in this mysterious relation?...

He saw that Miranda was already near the window, that Lady Donnisthorpe was approaching him. He followed instantly in Miranda's steps, and Lady Donnisthorpe, perceiving his attention, had the complaisance to turn aside. For the window opened on to a balcony wherein discreet palms sheltered off a nook. There was one of Lady Donnisthorpe's guests who did not share her ladyship's complacency. A censorious dowager sitting near to the window had kept an alert eye upon the couple in the recess during the last three dances; and each time that her daughter--a pretty girl with hair of the palest possible gold, and light blue eyes that were dancing with a child's delight at all the wonders of a first season--returned to the shelter of her portly frame, the dowager drew moral lessons for her benefit from the text of the oblivious couple. She remarked with pain upon their increasing infatuation for each other; she pointed out to her daughter a hapless youth who tiptoed backwards and forwards before Mrs. Warriner, with a dance-card in his hand, too timorous to interrupt the intimate conversation; and when Mrs. Warriner dropped a glove as she stepped over the window-sill on to the balcony, the dowager nudged her daughter with an elbow.

"Now, Mabel, there's a coquette," she said.

Charnock was close behind, and overheard the triumphant remark.

"I beg your pardon," he said politely, "it was the purest accident."

The dowager bridled; her face grew red; she raised her tortoiseshell glasses and annihilated Charnock with a single stare. Charnock had the audacity to smile. He stooped and picked up the glove. Mrs. Warriner had indeed dropped the glove by accident; but since it fell in Charnock's way and since he picked it up, it was to prove, like the handbill at Gibraltar and the draft on Lloyd's bank, a thing trivial in itself, but the opportunity of strange events.

CHAPTER V

[WHEREIN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA IMPROVE THEIR ACQUAINTANCESHIP IN A BALCONY]

Lady Donnisthorpe's house stood in Queen Anne's Gate, and the balcony overlooked St. James's Park. There Charnock found Miranda; he leaned his elbows upon the iron balustrade, and for a while neither of them spoke. It was a clear night of early June, odorous with messages of hedgerows along country lanes and uplands of young grass, and of bells ringing over meadows. In front of them the dark trees of the Park rippled and whispered to the stray breaths of wind; between the trees one line of colourless lamps marked the footpath across the bridge to the Mall; and the carriages on the outer roadway ringed that enclosure of thickets and lawns with flitting sparks of fire.

Charnock was still holding the glove which he had picked up on the window-sill.

"That's mine," said Miranda; "thank you," and she stretched out her hand for it.

"Yes," said Charnock, absently, and he drew the glove through his fingers. It was a delicate trifle of white kid; he smoothed it, and his hand had the light touch of a caress. "Miranda," he said softly but distinctly, and lingered on the word as though the sound pleased him.

Miranda started and then sank back again in her chair with a quiet smile. Very likely she blushed at this familiar utterance of her name, and at the caressing movement of his hand which accompanied and perhaps interpreted the utterance, or perhaps it was only at a certain throb of her own heart that she blushed. At all events, the darkness concealed the blush, and Charnock was not looking in her direction.

The freshness of the night air had restored her, but she was very willing to sit there in silence so long as no questions were asked of her, and Charnock had rather the air of one who works out a private problem for himself than one who seeks the answer from another.

The clock upon Westminster tower boomed the hour of twelve. Miranda noticed that Charnock raised his head and listened to the twelve heavy strokes with a smile. His manner was that of a man who comes unexpectedly upon some memento of an almost forgotten time.

"That is a familiar sound to you," said Mrs. Warriner, and she was suddenly sensible of a great interest in all of the past life of this man who was standing beside her.

"Yes," said Charnock, turning round to her.

"You lived in Westminster, then? At one time I used to stay here a good deal. Where did you live?"

Charnock laughed. "You would probably be no wiser if I named the street; it is not of those which you and your friends go up and down," he replied simply. "Yes, I lived in Westminster for three hard, curious years."

"It's not only the years that are curious," said Miranda, but the hint was lost, for Charnock had turned back to the balustrade. She was still, however, inclined to persist. The details which Lady Donnisthorpe had sown in her mind, now bore their crop. Interested in the man, now that she knew him, she was also interested in his career, in his hurried migratory life, in the mystery which enveloped his youth, and all the more because of the contrast between her youth and his. He had lived for three years in some small back street of Westminster; very likely she had more than once rubbed shoulders with him in the streets on the occasions when she had come up from her home in Suffolk. That home became instantly very distinct in her memories--an old manor-house guarded by a moat of dark silent water, a house or broad red-brick chimneys whereon she had known the roses to bloom on a Christmas-day, and of leaded windows upon which the boughs of trees continually tapped.

"I should like to show you my home," she said with a sudden impulse, and did not check herself before the words were spoken. "Perhaps some day," she continued hurriedly, "you will tell me of those three years you spent in Westminster." And she hoped that he had not heard the first sentence of the two.

"I will make an exchange," said Charnock. "I will exchange some day, if you will, the history of my three years for the history of your trouble." He turned eagerly towards her, but she held up her hand.

"Please, please!" she said in a low, shaking voice, for her distress had come back upon her. She had begun, if not to forget it, at all events to dull the remembrance of it since she had come out upon the balcony. She had, in a word, sought and found a compensation in the new friendship of this man, and a relief in his very naïveté. But he had brought her anxieties back to her, as he clearly understood, for he said: "That is the second time this evening. I am sorry."

"The second time?" said Miranda, quickly. "Why do you say that?"

"Am I wrong?" he asked. "Am I wrong in fearing that I myself have brought on you the trouble which I fancied I was to avert? I should be glad to know that I was wrong, for since I have stood here on this balcony, that fear has been growing. Your face so changed at the story I told you. At what point of it I do not know. I was not looking. Did I show you some misfortune you were unaware of, and might still be unaware of, if I had only held my tongue? In offering to shield you, did I only strike at you? I do not know, I am in the dark." He spoke in a voice of intense remorse, pleading for a proof that his fear was groundless, and Miranda did not answer him at all. "I do not ask you to speak freely now," he continued; "but sometime perhaps you will. You see, we shall be neighbours."

"Neighbours!" exclaimed Miranda, and her lips parted in a smile.

"You live at Ronda, Lady Donnisthorpe tells me; my headquarters now are at Algeciras;" and he told her briefly of his business there.

"My cousin did not tell me that," said Miranda.

Lady Donnisthorpe, in the wisdom of her heart, had, in fact, carefully concealed Charnock's place of abode, thinking it best that Miranda should learn it from Charnock's lips, and be pleasantly surprised thereby. That Miranda was pleasantly surprised might perhaps have been inferred by a more experienced man, from the extreme chilliness of her reply.

"Ronda is at the top," she said, "Algeciras at the bottom, and there are a hundred miles of hillside and cork-forest between."

"There are also," retorted Charnock, "a hundred miles of railway."

"Shall we go back into the room?" suggested Miranda.

"If you wish. Only there is something else I am trying to say to you," said Charnock, and at that Miranda laughed, and laughed with a fresh bright trill of amusement. It broke suddenly and spontaneously from her lips and surprised Charnock, who was at a loss to reconcile it with the signs of her distress. He turned towards her. "What is it?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said hastily, "nothing at all."

"You wished to go in?"

"Not now,--not for the world."

She was genuinely amused. Her eyes laughed at him in the starlight. Charnock was very content at the change in her, though he did not at all understand it. It made what he meant to say easier, if he could only find the means to say it. He held the means unwittingly in his hand, for he held Miranda's glove. It was that glove which provoked her amusement. Charnock, with a pertinacity which was only equalled by his absence of mind, was trying to force his hand into Mrs. Warriner's glove. He had already succeeded in slipping the long sleeve of it over his palm; he was now engaged in the more strenuous task of fitting his fingers into its slender fingers, as he leaned upon the balcony.

"You are laughing, no doubt, at my pertinacity, and it is true that our acquaintanceship is very slight," said he.

"In a moment you will irretrievably destroy it," said she, looking at the glove.

"I hope you don't mean that," he answered sadly, as he smoothed the finger-tip of the forefinger down upon his own, and at once proceeded to the other fingers. The little finger in particular needed a deal of strenuous coaxing, and caused him to break up his words with intervals of physical effort. "Because--as I say--we shall be neighbours--there!"--The exclamation "there" meant that he was satisfied with the third finger.--"A hundred miles of hill-side--in a foreign country--on a map a thumb will cover it."

"Will it cover a thumb, though?" asked Miranda, who took a feminine interest in the durability of her glove. She leaned forward in a delighted suspense, as Charnock proceeded to answer her question by experiment.

"There's the railway too," said he, as he struggled with the thumb of the glove, "and as I say, a foreign country. Very likely, we shall be nearer neighbours, though you are at Ronda and I am at Algeciras, than if you lived in this house and I at the house next door. Because after all there's one advantage in trouble of any kind. Trouble is the short foot-path to friendship, don't you think? Like that line of lamps across the Park."

Miranda forgot the glove. She was touched by the deep sincerity of his voice, by the modesty of his manner. She rose from her chair and stood by his side at the balustrade. "Yes," she answered, looking at the circling lights on the outer rim of the Park. "I think that is true. It spares one the long carriage-road of ceremonial acquaintanceship. But," she said thoughtfully, "I do not know whether after all I shall soon return to Ronda."

She heard a little sound of something tearing, and there was Charnock contemplating in amazement upon his left hand a white kid glove of which the kid was ripped across the palm. He felt in his pocket with his right hand and drew out both of his own gloves, which he had taken off while he was talking in the alcove. Then he looked at Miranda and his amazement became remorse.

"It's yours!" he said. "Of course, I picked it up. I had forgotten even that I was holding it. I had no notion that I was putting it on."

"I gave you fair warning," said Miranda, with a frank laugh, "but you would not pay any attention."

Charnock looked at her with absolute incredulity. "You mean to say that you don't mind? You are wonderful!"

"It seems almost too late to mind," said she, looking at the tattered glove.

"Or to mend," said he, ruefully, drawing it off with extreme care, and as a new thought struck him. "Oh!" he exclaimed, "suppose it had belonged to anyone else, the dowager in the window, for instance." He dangled the glove in the air. "Now that's a lesson!"

"Perhaps it's a parable," said Miranda, as she took the glove from him.

Charnock saw that she had grown quite serious. "If so," said he, "I cannot expound it."

"Shall I?" The smile had faded from her lips, her eyes shone upon his, with no longer a sparkle of merriment, but very still, very grave.

"Yes."

"Well, then," she said slowly, "shall I say that no man can offer a woman his friendship or help without doing her a hurt in some other way?"

His eyes as steadily answered back to hers. "Do you believe that?" he said. He spoke quite simply without raising his voice in any way, but none the less Mrs. Warriner was certain that she had but to say "yes," and there would be an end, now and forever, of his questions, of his help, of his friendship, of everything between them beyond the merest acquaintanceship. Perhaps some day they might cross the harbour together in the same ferry from Algeciras to Gibraltar, and bow and exchange a careless word, but that would be all--and only that until his work was finished there.

"Do you believe that?"

She was half tempted to say "yes"; but she had an instinct, a premonition, that whatever answer she made would stretch out to unknown and incalculable consequences. She seemed to herself to be drawing the lots which one way or another would decide and limit all her years to come. Upon the tiny "yes" or "no" between which she had to make her choice, her whole life was destined to pivot. Accordingly, she made up her mind to say neither, but to turn the matter into a jest. "Here's the proof," said she, as lightly as she could, and she flourished the glove.

But the man steadily held her to his question, with his eyes, with his voice, with his very attitude. "Do you believe that?" he repeated.

"I don't know whether I believe it," she murmured resentfully. "I don't see why I should be asked to mean what I say, or whether I mean what I say.... But it might be so, I think.... I don't know.... I don't know."

To her relief Charnock moved. If he had stood like that, demanding an answer with every line of his body, for another instant, she knew she would have been compelled to answer one way or another; and she felt certain, too, that whatever answer she gave it would have been the one she would have wished afterwards to take back. "Now if you are satisfied," she added with a touch of petulance, "we will go in."

He moved aside for her to pass, but before she had time to step forward, he moved back again and barred the way. "No, please," he said quickly, and his voice thrilled as though he had hit upon an inspiration.

"Lady Donnisthorpe told me you were rather unconventional," she remarked with a sigh, which was only half of it a jest; and she drew back as though she did not wish to hear what he had to say, as though she almost feared to hear it.

But Charnock barely even remarked her reluctance. "That glove," he said, and pointed to it. Miranda imagined that he was reaching out a hand for it.

"I have heaps of pairs," she exclaimed, whipping it behind her back; "there is no need to trouble about it at all."

"I do not ask for it; I had no thought of that. On the contrary, I would ask you to keep it if you will. There is something else which I was trying to say, if you remember."

"Dear, dear!" said Miranda, ruefully, "I could wish after all that you had trodden on my toes."

"I beg your pardon," said Charnock, and instantly he drew aside. He left the way clear for her. She passed him, and went towards the window, from which the lights and the music streamed out into the night. Had he followed, she would have stepped into the room, amongst the dancers; she would have been claimed by a partner, and she would have seen no more of Charnock, and the only consequences of this interview upon the balcony would have been a memory in her thoughts, a curiosity in her speculations.

But Charnock did not follow her. He remained where she left him, and her feet loitered more with every step she took. At the edge of the window she stopped. For the second time that evening she became aware that one way or other she must do the irrevocable thing. It was a mere step to make across the sill of the window, from the stone of the balcony to the parquet of the ball-room floor,--a thing insignificant in itself and in its consequences most momentous. She stood for a second undecided. The sight of her partner looking about the room decided her. She came back to where Charnock stood in a soldierly rigidity.

"You might have come half-way to meet me," she said in a whimsical complaint, and then very gently: "I will hear what you wish to say, if you will still say it."

"What I mean is this," he replied; "it is what I was trying to say. The hardest thing, if one ever wants help, is--don't you think?--the asking for it. I could not say that to you until I had hit upon a means by which the asking, should it ever be necessary, might be dispensed with. And it seemed to me that there was something providential in my tearing that glove; for that torn glove can be the means, if ever you see fit to use it. You live at Ronda; for the next year I am to be found at Algeciras; you will only have to send that torn glove to me in an envelope. I shall know without a word from you; and when I answer it by coming up to you at Ronda, it will be understood by both of us, again without a word, why I have come. I shall not need to speak at all; you will only need to say the precise particular thing which needs to be done."

Miranda stood with her eyelids closed, and her ungloved hand pressed over her heart. The blood darkened her cheeks. Charnock saw her whole face soften and sweeten. "I understand," she said in a low voice. "I might appeal and be spared the humiliation of appealing, like the face in your mirror."

"I believe," said he, "that my mirror sent me a message on that night. I have tried to deliver it."

Miranda slowly raised her eyes and they glistened with something other than the starlight. "Thank you," she said; "for the delicacy of the thought I am most grateful. What woman would not be? But I do not think that I shall ever send you the glove: not because I would not be glad to owe gratitude to you, but just for the same reason which has kept me from telling you anything of my troubles. Such as they are I must fight them through by myself."

This time she passed over the sill into the ballroom; but she was holding the glove tight against her breast, and she had a feeling that Charnock very surely knew that at some time she would send it to him.

CHAPTER VI

[WHILE CHARNOCK BUILDS CASTLES IN SPAIN, MIRANDA RETURNS THERE]

The anxious dowager, who was preparing to depart with her daughter, had just risen from her seat by the window as Miranda stepped over the sill into the ball-room. She sat down again, however, for she had a word or two to say concerning Miranda's appearance.

"Muriel," she observed, "take a good look at that woman, and remember that if ever you sit out with one man for half-an-hour on a cool balcony you can make no greater mistake than to return with a flushed face."

"Thank you, mother," said Muriel, who was growing restive under this instructional use of an evening party. "I will take the first opportunity of practising your advice."

At this moment Charnock stepped over the sill. He stepped up to Mrs. Warriner's side and spoke to her. Mrs. Warriner stopped within a couple of yards of the dowager and gave her hand, and with her hand her eyes, to her companion.

"Muriel, look!" said the censorious one. "How vulgar!"

"Shall I listen too?" asked Muriel, innocently.

"Do, my child, do!" said the dowager, who was impervious to sarcasm.

What was said, however, did not reach the dowager's ears. It was, indeed, no more than an interchange of "good-nights," but the dowager bridled, perhaps out of disappointment that she had not heard.

"An intriguing woman I have no doubt," said she, as through her glasses she followed Miranda's retreat.

"Surely she has too much dignity," objected the daughter.

"Dignity, indeed! My child, when you know more of the world, you will understand that the one astonishing thing about such women is not their capacity for playing tricks but their incredible power of retaining their self-respect while they are playing them. Now we will go."

The dowager's voice was a high one. It carried her words clearly to Charnock, who had not as yet moved. He laughed at them then with entire incredulity, but he retained them unwittingly in his memory. The next moment the dowager swept past him. The daughter Muriel followed, and as she passed Charnock she looked at him with an inquisitive friendliness. But her eyes happened to meet his, and with a spontaneous fellow-feeling the girl and the man smiled to each other and at the dowager, before they realised that they were totally unacquainted.

Lady Donnisthorpe was lying in wait for Charnock. She asked him to take her to the buffet. Charnock secured for her a chair and an ice, and stood by her side, conversational but incommunicative. She was consequently compelled herself to broach the subject which was at that moment nearest to her heart.

"How did you get on with my cousin?" she asked.

Charnock smiled foolishly at nothing.

"Oh, say something!" cried Lady Donnisthorpe, and tapped with her spoon upon the glass plate.

"Tell me about her," said Charnock, drawing up another chair.

Lady Donnisthorpe lowered her voice and said with great pathos: "She is most unhappy."

Charnock gravely nodded his head. "Why?"

Lady Donnisthorpe settled herself comfortably with the full intention of wringing Charnock's heart if by any means she could.

"Miranda comes of an old Catholic Suffolk family. She was eighteen when she married, and that's six years ago. No, six years and a half. Ralph Warriner was a Lieutenant in the Artillery, and made her acquaintance when he was staying in the neighbourhood of the Pollards, that's Miranda's house in Suffolk. Ralph listened to Allan Bedlow's antediluvian stories. Allan was Miranda's father, her mother died long ago. Ralph captured the father; finally he captured the daughter. Ralph, you see, had many graces but no qualities; he was a bad stone in a handsome setting and Miranda was no expert. How could she be? She lived at Glenham with only her father and a discontented relation, called Jane Holt, for her companions. Consequently she married Ralph Warriner, who got his step the day after the marriage, and the pair went immediately to Gibraltar. Ralph had overestimated Miranda's fortune, and it came out that he was already handsomely dipped; so that their married life began with more than the usual disadvantages. It lasted for three years, and for that time only because of Miranda's patience and endurance. She is very silent about those three years, but we know enough," and Lady Donnisthorpe was for a moment carried away. "It must have been intolerable," she exclaimed. "Ralph Warriner never had cared a snap of his fingers for her. His tastes were despicable, his disposition utterly mean. Cards were in his blood; I verily believe that his heart was an ace of spades. Add to that that he was naturally cantankerous and jealous. To his brother officers he was civil for he owed them money, but he made up for his civility by becoming a bully once he had closed his own front door."

"Yes, yes," interrupted Charnock, hurriedly, as though he had no heart to hear more; "I understand."

"You can understand then that when the crash came we were glad. Two years after the marriage old Allan Bedlow sickened. Miranda came home to nurse him and Ralph--he bought a schooner-yacht. Allan Bedlow died; Miranda inherited, and the estate was settled upon her. Ralph could not touch a farthing of the capital, and he was aggrieved. Miranda returned to Gibraltar, and matters went from worse to worse. The crash came a year later. The nature of it is neither here nor there, but Ralph had to go, and had to go pretty sharp. His schooner-yacht was luckily lying in Gibraltar Bay; he slipped on board before gunfire, and put to sea as soon as it was dark; and he was not an instant too soon. From that moment he disappeared, and the next news we had of him was the discovery of his body upon Rosevear two years afterwards."

Charnock hunted through the jungle of Lady Donnisthorpe's words for a clue to the distress which Miranda had betrayed that evening, but he did not discover one. Another question forced itself into his mind. "Why does Mrs. Warriner live at Ronda?" he asked. "I have never been there, but there are no English residents, I should think."

"That was one of her reasons," replied Lady Donnisthorpe. "At least I think so, but upon that too she is silent, and when she will not speak no one can make her. You see what Ralph did was hushed up,--it was one of those cases which are hushed up,--particularly since he had disappeared and was out of reach. But everyone knew that disgrace attached to it. His name was removed from the Army List. Miranda perhaps shrank from the disgrace. She shrank too, I think, from the cheap pity of which she would have had so much. At all events she did not return home, she sent for Jane Holt, her former companion, and settled at Ronda." Lady Donnisthorpe looked doubtfully at Charnock. "Perhaps there were other reasons too, sacred reasons." But she had not made up her mind whether it would be wise to explain those other reasons before her guests began to take their leave of her; and so the opportunity was lost.

Charnock walked back to his hotel that night in a frame of mind entirely strange to him. He was inclined to rhapsodise; he invented and rejected various definitions of woman; he laughed at the worldly ignorance of the dowager. "A woman, madam "--he imagined himself to be lecturing her--"is the great gift to man to keep him clean and bright like a favourite sword." He composed other and no less irreproachable phrases, and in the midst of this exhilarating exercise was struck suddenly aghast at the temerity of his own conduct that night, at the remembrance of his persistency. However, he was not in a mood to be disheartened. The dawn took the sky by surprise while he was still upon his way. The birds bustled among the leaves in the gardens, and a thrush tried his throat, and finding it clear gave full voice to his song. The blackbirds called one to the other, and a rosy light struck down the streets. It was morning, and he stopped to wonder whether Miranda was yet asleep. He hoped so, intensely, for the sake of her invaluable health.

But Miranda was seated by her open window, listening to the birds calling in the Park, and drawing some quiet from the quiet of the lawns and trees; and every now and then she glanced across her shoulder to where a torn white glove lay upon the table, as though she was afraid it would vanish by some enchantment.

But the next day Miranda packed her boxes, and when Charnock called upon Lady Donnisthorpe, he was informed that she had returned in haste to Ronda. Charnock was surprised, for he remembered that Mrs. Warriner had expressed a doubt whether she would ever return to Ronda, and wondered what had occurred to change her mind. But the surprise and bewilderment were soon swallowed up in a satisfaction which sprang from the assurance that Miranda and he were after all to be neighbours.

CHAPTER VII

[IN WHICH MAJOR WILBRAHAM DESCRIBES THE STEPS BY WHICH HE ATTAINED HIS MAJORITY, AND GIVES MIRANDA SOME PARTICULAR INFORMATION]

A month later at Ronda, and a little after midday. In the cool darkness of the Cathedral, under the great stone dome behind the choir, Miranda was kneeling before a lighted altar. That altar she had erected, as an inscription showed, to the memory of Ralph Warriner, and since her return from England she had passed more than an ordinary proportion of her time in front of it.

This morning, however, an unaccountable uneasiness crept over her. She tried to shake the sensation off by an increased devoutness, but though her knees were bent, there was no prayer in her mind or upon her lips. Her uneasiness increased, and after a while it defined itself. Someone was watching her from behind.

She ceased even from the pretence of prayer. Her heart fluttered up into her throat. She did not look round, she did not move, but she knelt there with a sinking expectation, in the light of the altar candles, and felt intensely helpless because their yellow warmth streamed full upon her face and person, and must disclose her to the watching eyes behind.

She knelt waiting for a familiar voice and a familiar step. She heard only the grating of a chair upon the stone flags beyond the choir, and a priest droning a litany very far away. Here all was quiet--quiet as the eyes watching her out of the gloom.

At last, resenting her cowardice, she rose to her feet and turned. At once a man stepped forward, and her heart gave a great throb of relief, as she saw the man was a stranger.

He bowed, and with an excuse for his intrusion, he handed her a card. She did not look at it, for immediately the stranger continued to speak, in a cool, polite voice, and it seemed to her that all her blood stood still.

"I knew Captain Warriner at Gibraltar," he said. "In fact I may say that I know him, for he is alive."

Miranda was dimly aware that he waited for an answer, and then excused her silence with an accent of sarcasm.

"Such good news must overwhelm you, no doubt. I have used all despatch to inform you of it, for I was only certain of the truth yesterday."

And to her amazement Miranda heard herself reply:

"Then I discovered it a month before you did."

The next thing of which she was conscious was a thick golden mist before her eyes. The golden mist was the clear sunlight in the square before the Cathedral. Miranda was leaning against the stone parapet, though how she was there she could not have told. She had expected the news. She had even thought that the man standing behind her was her husband, come to tell her it in person; but nevertheless the mere telling of it, the putting of it in words, to quote the stranger's phrase, had overwhelmed her. Memories of afternoons during which she had walked out with her misery to Europa Point, of evenings when she had sat with her misery upon the flat house-top watching the riding lights in Algeciras Bay, and listening to the jingle of tambourines from the houses on the hillside below--all the sordid unnecessary wretchedness of those three years spent at Gibraltar came crushing her. She savoured again the disgrace which attended upon Ralph's flight. Her first instinct, when she learned Ralph was alive, had urged her to hide, and at this moment she regretted that she had not obeyed it. She regretted that she had returned to Ronda, where Ralph or any emissary of his at once could find her.

But that was only for a moment. She had returned to Ronda with a full appreciation of the consequences of her return, and for reasons which she was afterwards to explain, and of which, even while she stood in that square, she resumed courage to approve.

The stranger came from the door of the Cathedral and crossed to her.

"Your matter-of-fact acceptance of my news was clever, Mrs. Warriner," he said with a noticeable sharpness. "Believe me, I do homage to cleverness. I frankly own that I expected a scene of sorts. I was quite taken aback--a compliment, I assure you, upon my puff," and he bowed with his hand on his breast. "You were out of the Cathedral door before I realised that all this time you had been the Captain's--would you mind if I said accomplice?"

That her matter-of-fact acceptance of the news was entirely due to the fact that the news dazed her, Miranda did not trouble to explain.

"The altar," continued the stranger, in a voice of genuine admiration, "was a master-stroke. To erect an altar to the memory of a husband who is still alive, to pray devoutly before it, is highly ingenious and--may I say?--brave. Religion is a trump-card, Mrs. Warriner, in most of the games where you sit with law and order for your opponents; but not many women have the bravery to play it for its value."

Miranda coloured at his words. There had been some insincerity in her daily prayers before the altar, though the self-satisfied man who spoke to her had not his finger upon the particular flaw,--enough insincerity to cause Miranda some shame, now that she probed it, and yet in the insincerity there had been also something sincere. The truth is, Miranda could bring herself to wish neither that her husband was dead if he was alive, nor that he should come to life again if he was dead; she made a compromise--she daily prayed with great fervour for his soul's salvation before the altar she had erected to his memory. But this again was not a point upon which she troubled to enlighten her companion. She was more concerned to discover who the man was, and on what business he had come.

"You knew my husband at Gibraltar," she said, "and yet--"

"It is true," replied the man, in answer to her suspicion. "You need not be afraid, Mrs. Warriner. I have not come from Scotland Yard. I have had, I admit, relations with the police, but they have always been of an involuntary kind."

"You assume," said she, with some pride, "that I have reason to fear Scotland Yard, whereas nothing was further from my thoughts. Only you say that you knew my husband at Gibraltar. You pretend to come from him--"

"By no means. We are at cross-purposes, I fancy. I do not come from him, though most certainly I did know him at Gibraltar. But I admit that he never invited me to his house."

"In that case," said Miranda, with a cold bow, "I can do no more than thank you for the news you give me and wish you a good day."

She walked by him. He turned and imperturbably fell into step by her side. "Clever," said he, "clever!" Miranda stopped. "Who are you? What is your business?" she asked.

"As to who I am, you hold my card in your hand."

Mrs. Warriner had carried it from the Cathedral, unaware that she held it. She now raised it to her eyes and read, Major Ambrose Wilbraham.

Wilbraham noted, though he did not understand, the rapid, perplexed glance which she shot at him. Charnock had spoken to her of a Major Wilbraham, had described him, and undoubtedly this was the man. "As to my business," he continued, "I give you the news that your husband is alive, but I have also something to sell."

"What?"

"Obviously my silence. It might be awkward if it was known in certain quarters that Captain Warriner, who sold the mechanism of the new Daventry quick-firing gun to a foreign power; who slipped out of Gibraltar just a night before his arrest was determined on, and who was wrecked a year ago in the Scillies, is not only alive, but in the habit of paying periodical visits to England."

Mrs. Warriner again read the name upon the card. "Major Ambrose Wilbraham," she said, with an incredulous emphasis on the Major.

"Captains," he retorted airily, "have at times deviated from the narrow path, so that a Major may well be forgiven a peccadillo. But I will not deceive you, Mrs. Warriner. The rank was thrust upon me by a barman in Shaftesbury Avenue, and I suffered it, because the title after all gives me the entrance to the chambers of many young men who have, or most often have not, just taken their degrees. So Major I am, but my mess is any bar within a mile of Piccadilly Circus. Shall we say that I hold brevet rank, and am seconded for service in the noble regiment of the soldiers of fortune?"

"And the enemies you fight with," said Miranda, with a contemptuous droop of the lips, "are women like myself."

"Pardon me," retorted Wilbraham, with unabashed good humour. "Women like yourself, Mrs. Warriner, are the vivandières whom we regretfully impress to supply our needs upon the march. Our enemies are the rozzers--again I beg your pardon--the gentlemen in blue who lurk at the street corners, by whom from time to time we are worsted and interned."

They walked across the square along a narrow street down towards the Tajo, that deep chasm which bisects the town. The heat was intense, the road scorched under foot, and they walked slowly. They made a strange pair in the old, quaint streets, the woman walking with a royal carriage, delicate in her beauty and her dress; the man defiant, battered and worn, with an eye which from sheer habit scouted in front and aside for the chance which might toss his day's rations in his way.

Their talk was stranger still, for by an unexpressed consent, the subject of the bargain to be struck was deferred, and as they walked Wilbraham illustrated to Miranda the career of a man who lives by his wits, and dwelt even with humour upon its alternations of prosperity and starvation. "I have been a manager of theatrical companies in 'the smalls,'" he said, "a billiard-marker at Trieste, a racing tipster, a vender of--photographs, and I once carried a sandwich-board down Bond Street, and saw the women I had danced with not so long before draw their delicate skirts from the defilement of my rags. However, I rose to a better position. It is funny, you know, to go right under, and then find there are social degrees in the depths. I have had good times too, mind you. Every now and then I have struck an A1 copper-bottomed gold mine, and then there were dress suits and meals running into one another, and ormolu rooms on the first floor."

Dark sayings, unintelligible shibboleths, came and went among his words and obscured their meaning; accents and phrases from many countries betrayed the vicissitudes of his life; but he spoke with the accent of a gentleman, and with something of a gentleman's good humour; so that Miranda, moved partly by his recital and perhaps partly because her own misfortunes had touched her to an universal sympathy, began to be interested in the man who had experienced so much that was strange to her, and they both slipped into a tolerance of each other and a momentary forgetfulness of their relationship as blackmailer and blackmailed.

"I could give you a modern edition of Don Guzman," he said. "I was a money-lender's tout at Gibraltar at one time. It's to that I owed my acquaintance with Warriner. It's to that I owe my present acquaintance with you." He came to a dead stop in the full swing of narration. He halted in his steps and banged the point of his stick down into the road. "But I have done with it," he cried, and drawing a great breath, he showed to Miranda a face suddenly illuminated. "The garrets and the first floors, the stale billiard rooms, the desperate scouting for food like a damned sea-gull--I beg your pardon, Mrs. Warriner. Upon my word, I do! But imagine a poor beggar of a bankrupt painter who, after fifteen years, suddenly finds himself with a meal upon the table and his bills paid! I am that man. Fifteen years of what I have described to you! It might have been less, no doubt, but I hadn't learnt my lesson. Fifteen years, and from first to last not one thing done of the few things worth doing; fifteen years of a murderous hunt for breakfast and dinner! And I've done with it, thanks to you, Mrs. Warriner." And his face hardened at once and gleamed at her, very cruel and menacing. "Yes, thanks to you! We'll not forget that." And as he resumed his walk the astounding creature began gaily to quote poetry:

"I resume

Life after death; for 'tis no less than life

After such long, unlovely labouring days.

A great poet, Mrs. Warriner. What do you think?"

"No doubt," said Miranda, absently. That one cruel glance had chilled the sympathy in her; Major Wilbraham would not spare either Ralph or herself with the memory of those fifteen years to harden him.

They came to the Ciudad, the old intricate Moorish town of tortuous lanes in the centre of Ronda. Before a pair of heavy walnut doors curiously encrusted with bright copper nails Wilbraham came to a stop. "Your house, I think, Mrs. Warriner," and he took off his hat and wiped his forehead.

"I should prefer," said she, "to hear what you have to say in the Alameda."

"As you will. I am bound to say that I could have done with a soda and I'm so frisky, but I recognise that I have no right to trespass upon your hospitality."

They went on, crossed a small plaza, and so came down to the Tajo. A bridge spans the ravine in a single arch; in the centre of the bridge Miranda stopped, leaned over the parapet and looked downwards. Wilbraham followed her example. For three hundred feet the walls of the gorge fell sheer, at the bottom the turbulence of a torrent foamed and roared, at the top was the span of the bridge. In the brickwork of the arch a tiny window looked out on air.

"Do you see that window?" said Miranda, drily. "The prison is underfoot in the arch of the bridge."

"Indeed, how picturesque," returned Wilbraham, easily, who was quite untouched by any menace which Miranda's words might suggest. Miranda looked across the road towards a guardia. Wilbraham lazily followed the direction of her glance; for all the emotion which he showed blackmail might have been held in Spain an honourable means of livelihood. Miranda turned back. "That window," she said, "is the window of the prison."

"The view," remarked Wilbraham, "would compensate in some measure for the restriction."

"Chains might add to the restriction."

"Chains are unpleasant," Wilbraham heartily agreed.

Miranda realised that she had tempted defeat in this little encounter. She accepted it and walked on.

"You were wise to come off that barrow, Mrs. Warriner," Wilbraham remarked in approval.

They crossed the bridge and entered the Mercadillo, the new Spanish quarter of the town, ascended the hill, and came to the bull ring. Before that Wilbraham stopped. "Why do we go to the Alameda?"

"We can talk there on neutral ground."

"It seems a long way."

"On the other hand," replied Miranda, "the Alameda is close to the railway station. By the bye, how did you know where I lived?"

"There was no difficulty in discovering that. I learnt at Gibraltar that you lived at Ronda, and the station-master here told me where. When I saw your house I did not wonder at your choice. You were wise to take a Moorish house, I fancy--the patio with the tamarisks in the middle and the fountain and the red and green tiles--very pleasant, I should think. A door or two stood open. The rooms seemed charming, low in roof, with dark panels, of a grateful coolness, and so far as I could judge, with fine views."

"You went into the house, then?" exclaimed Miranda.

"Yes, I asked for you, and was told that Miss Holt was at home. I thought it wise to go in--one never knows. So I introduced myself, but not my business, to Miss Holt--your cousin, is she not? A profound sentimentalist, I should fancy; I noticed she was reading Henrietta Temple. She complained of being much alone; she nurses grievances, no doubt. Sentimentalists have that habit--what do you say?" Miranda could have laughed at the shrewdness of the man's perceptions, had she not been aware that the shrewdness was a weapon directed against her own breast.

They reached the Alameda. Miranda led the way to a bench which faced the railings. Wilbraham looked quickly and suspiciously at her, and then walked to the railings and looked over. The Alameda is laid out upon the very edge of the Ronda plateau, and Wilbraham looked straight down a sheer rock precipice of a thousand feet. He remained in that posture for some seconds. From the foot of that precipice the plain of the Vega stretched out level as a South-sea lagoon. The gardens of a few cottages were marked out upon the green like the squares of a chess-board; upon the hedges there was here and there the flutter of white linen. Orchards of apples, cherries, peaches, and pears, enriched the plain with their subdued colours, and the Guadiaro, freed from the confinement of its chasm, wound through it with the glitter and the curve of a steel spring. A few white Moorish mills upon the banks of the stream were at work, and the sound of them came droning through the still heat up to Wilbraham's ears.

Wilbraham, however, was not occupied with the scenery, for when he turned back to Miranda his face was dark and angry.

"Why did you bring me to the Alameda?" he asked sternly.

"Because I will not listen to you in my own, house," she answered with spirit.

Wilbraham did not resent the reason, but he watched her warily, as though he doubted it.

"Now," said Miranda, as she stood before him. "You tell me that my husband is living. I have your bare word for it, and out of your lips you have proved to me that your bare word has very little worth."

"The buttons are off the foils," said he; "very well. In the Cathedral you corroborated my word. You know that he lives; I know it."

"How do you know it?"

"By adding two and two and making five, as any man with any savvy always can," replied Wilbraham. "Indeed, by adding two and two, one can even at times make a decent per annum."

Mrs. Warriner sat down upon the bench, and Wilbraham, standing at her side, presented the following testimonial to his "savvy." First of all, he drew from one pocket four pounds of English gold, and from the other a handful of dollars and pesetas. "This is what is left of two hundred and thirty pounds, which I won at Monte Carlo in the beginning of May. There's a chance for philosophy, Mrs. Warriner. If I hadn't won that money I shouldn't be standing here now with my livelihood assured. For I shouldn't have been able to embark on the P. and O. mail steamer India at Marseilles, and so I shouldn't have fallen in with my dear young friend Charnock."

Miranda fairly started at the mention of Charnock's name in connection with Wilbraham's discovery. Instantly Wilbraham paused. Miranda made an effort to look entirely unconcerned, but Wilbraham's eye was upon her, and she felt the blood colouring her cheeks.

"Oho!" said Wilbraham, cocking his head. Then he whistled softly to himself while he looked her over from head to foot. Miranda kept silence, and he resumed his story, though every time he mentioned Charnock's name he looked to surprise her in some movement.

"Off Ushant we came up with a brigantine, and I couldn't help fancying that her lines were familiar to me. Charnock lent me his binoculars--a dear good fellow, Charnock!--and I made out her name, the Tarifa. I should not have given the boat another thought but for Charnock. Charnock said she had the lines of a Salcombe clipper. Did you happen to know that the Ten Brothers was a Salcombe clipper? I did, and the moment Charnock had spoken I understood why the look of her hull was familiar; I had seen her or her own legitimate sister swinging at Warriner's moorings in Algeciras Bay. I did not set any great store upon that small point, however, until Charnock kindly informed me that her owner could have gained no possible advantage by altering her rig from a schooner's into a brigantine's. Then my interest began to rise, for he had altered the rig. Why, if the change was to his disadvantage? I can't say that I had any answer ready; I can't say that I expected to find an answer. But since I landed at Plymouth, from which Salcombe is a bare twenty miles, I thought that I might as well run over. One never knows--such small accidents mean everything for us--and, as a matter of fact, I spent a very pleasant half-hour in the back parlour of the Commercial Inn, watching the yachts at anchor and the little sailing boats spinning about the river, and listening to an old skipper, who deplored the times when the town rang with the din of hammers in shipbuilding yards, and twelve--observe, Mrs. Warriner, twelve--schooners brought to it the prosperity of their trade. The schooners had been sold off, but the skipper had their destinies at his fingers' ends as a man follows the fortunes of his children. Two had been cast away, three were in the Newfoundland trade, one was now a steam-yacht, and the others still carried fruit from the West Indies. He accounted for eleven of them, and the twelfth, of course, was the Ten Brothers wrecked upon Rosevear. I eliminated the Ten Brothers, the two which had been cast away, and the steam-yacht. Eight were left."

"Yes?" said Mrs. Warriner.

"I went back to Plymouth and verified the skipper's information. He had given me the owners' names and the names of the vessels. I looked them up in the sailing-lists and I proved beyond a shadow of doubt, from their dates of sailing and arrival at various ports, that not one of those eight schooners could have been the brigantine we passed off Ushant. There remained, then, the four which I had eliminated, or rather the three, for the steam-yacht was out of the question. Do you follow?"

Miranda made a sign of assent.

"Those three boats had been cast away. Two of them belonged to respectable firms, the third to Ralph Warriner. It would of course be very convenient for Ralph Warriner, under the circumstances, to be reputed dead and yet to be alive with a boat in hand, so to speak. On the other side, would it profit either of the two respectable firms to spread a false report that one of their boats had been cast away? Hardly; besides, it would of course be to Warriner's advantage, from the point of view of concealment, to change the rig and the name of his boat. It was all inference and guess-work, no doubt. Charnock, for instance, might have been entirely wrong; the Tarifa might never have been anything but the Tarifa and a brigantine; but the inference and the guess-work all pointed the one way, and I own that my interest was rapidly changing to excitement. My suspicions were strengthened by the behaviour of the Tarifa herself. No news of her approach was recorded in the papers. She didn't make any unnecessary noise about the port she was bound for, nor had she the manners to pass the time of day with any of Lloyd's signal-stations. The Tarifa's business began to provoke my curiosity. Here was (shall we say?) a needless lack of ceremony to begin with. It didn't seem as if the Tarifa had many anxious friends awaiting her arrival. Besides that, supposing that my suspicions were right, that the Tarifa was the Ten Brothers masquerading under another name, and that perhaps Ralph Warriner was on board, it stood to reason Ralph Warriner would not risk his skin in an English port, without a better reason than a cargo of trade. Comprenny, Mrs. Warriner? I was guessing, conjecturing, inferring; I had no knowledge. So I thought the cargo of the Tarifa was the right end of the stick to hang on to. If I could know the truth about that, I should be in a better position to guess whether it had anything to do with Ralph Warriner. Is that clear?"

It was clear enough to Miranda, who already felt herself enmeshed in the net of this man's ingenious deductions. "Yes," she said.

"Very well. From the brigantine's course, she was evidently making for one of the western harbours. I lay low in Plymouth for a couple of days, and read the shipping news. That wasn't all I did during those two days, though. I went to the Free Library besides, overhauled the file of the Western Morning News and assimilated information about the inquest at St. Mary's. The faceless mariner chucked up on Rosevear struck one as interesting. I noticed too that there had been a good many wrecks in the Channel during the heavy weather and the fog just about that time. But before I had come to any conclusion, I opened my newspaper on the third morning and read that the Tarifa had dropped her anchor at Falmouth. I took the first train out of Plymouth, and sure enough I picked the Tarifa up in Falmouth docks. Then I made friends with the port-officers, but I got never a glimpse of Ralph Warriner."

Miranda's hopes revived. She knew very well that Ralph Warriner was not at that time in Falmouth. For the moment, however, she let Wilbraham run on.

"I frankly admit that my hopes sank a little," he continued. "Of course Warriner might have been put ashore; but it seemed to me impossible to obtain sufficient certainty of my suspicions unless I actually clapped eyes on him."

Miranda agreed, and her prospects of escaping from this man's clutches showed brighter; for she was not in a mood of sufficient calmness to enable her to realise that Wilbraham would hardly have been so frank, if he had not by now at all events acquired absolute certainty.

"My hopes were to sink yet more," Wilbraham continued. "The brigantine passed for a tramp out from Tarifa with a cargo of fruit. I saw that cargo unloaded. There was no pretence about it; it was a full cargo of fruit. The boat was sailing back to Tarifa with a cargo of alkali, and I saw that cargo stowed away in her hold. Mrs. Warriner, my spirits began to revive. That cargo of alkali was most uncommon small; the profit on it wouldn't have paid the decky's wages. Again I inferred. I inferred that the alkali was a blind, and that the Tarifa meant to pick up a cargo of another sort somewhere along the coast, though what the cargo would be I could not for the life of me imagine."

"But it is all guess-work," said Miranda, with an indifference which she was far from feeling.

"I learned one piece of solid cheering information from my friends the port-officers," retorted Wilbraham. "The Tarifa's papers were all quite recent, and yet she was an old boat. She was supposed to be owned by her master."

"And no doubt was," added Miranda, with an assumption of weariness.

"It appeared that her saloon had caught fire; the saloon had been gutted and the Tarifa's papers destroyed a year before," Wilbraham resumed, untroubled by Mrs. Warriner's objections. "A pretty careless captain that, eh? A most uncommon careless captain, Mrs. Warriner? For a boat to lose her papers--well, its pretty much the same as when a girl loses her marriage lines in the melodramas. A most uncommon careless captain! Or a most astute one, you say. What? Well, I'll not deny but what you may be right. For that brigantine caught fire and burned her papers just about the date when the Ten Brothers went ashore on Rosevear. How's that for the long arm?"

"But you did not see my husband," said Miranda, stubbornly.

"And why?" asked Wilbraham, and answered his question. "Because your husband wasn't onboard."

"Then the whole story falls to the ground," exclaimed Miranda, as she rose from her seat.

"Wait a bit, Mrs. Warriner," said Wilbraham, and he sat down on the seat and nursed his leg. "The Tarifa was supposed to belong to her master, who went by the name of John Wilson. Now here's a funny thing. I never saw John Wilson, though I prowled about the docks enough. The port-officers described him to me, a grizzled seafaring man of fifty; but he was always snug in his cabin, and a mate did the show business with the cargo. I grew curious about John Wilson; I wanted to see John Wilson. Accordingly I located the chart-room from the wharf, then I put on a black thumb tie and a dirty collar so as to look like a clerk, and I walked boldly down the gangway and stepped across the deck. I chose my time, you understand. I knocked at the chart-room door. 'Come in,' said a voice, and in I walked. Mrs. Warriner, you could have knocked me down with that dainty parasol of yours if you had been present when I first saw John Wilson.

"'What do you want?' says he, short and sharp.

"'Will you take a load of cotton to Valencia?' says I, and I quoted an insignificant price.

"'I am not such a fool as you look,' said he, and out I went and shook hands with myself on the quay. For John Wilson--"

"Was not my husband," exclaimed Miranda, with almost a despairing violence. "He was not! He was not!"

"You are right, Mrs. Warriner, he was not. But he was a man whom you and I knew as Thomas Discipline, first mate of the schooner-yacht the Ten Brothers, of which Captain Ralph Warriner was the certificated master. And observe, please, the whole crew of the Ten Brothers was reported lost upon Rosevear."

"Thomas Discipline might have left the Ten Brothers before," argued Miranda. "His presence on the Tarifa does not connect my husband with that boat."

"That's precisely the objection which occurred to me," said Wilbraham, coolly. "But here was at last a fact which fitted in with my guess-work, and I own to being uplifted. That evening I got the ticket that the Tarifa was to put to sea the next day, and sure enough in the morning she swung out into the fairway and waited for the evening ebb. I passed that day in an altogether unenviable state of anxiety, Mrs. Warriner; for if by any chance I was wrong, if she did not mean to take up another cargo of a more profitable kind by dark, if she were to sail clean away for Ushant on the evening ebb, why, the boat might be the Ten Brothers or it might not, and the master might be the late Captain Warriner or he might not. Any way the bottom fell clean out of my little business. But she did not; she got her anchors in about eight o'clock and reached out towards the Lizard in the dusk with a light wind from the land on her beam."

"The story so far," Miranda interrupted, "seems nautical, but hardly to the point."

"Think so?" said Wilbraham, indifferently. "Did I mention that at the mouth of the harbour the Tarifa passed a steam launch pottering around the St. Anthony Light? Between you and me, Mrs. Warriner, I was holding the tiller of that steam launch."

"You!" she exclaimed.

"Just poor little me," said he, smiling politely, "with a few paltry thick-uns in my pocket to speculate in the hire of a steam launch. I gave the Tarifa a start and followed, keeping well away on her lee with her red light just in view. That first half-hour or so was a wearing time for me, Mrs. Warriner, I assure you," and he took off his hat and wiped his forehead, as though the anxiety came back upon him now. He laboured his breath and broke up his sentences with short nervous laughter. He seemed entirely to forget his companion, and the sun, and the Andalusian sierras across the plain; he was desperately hunting the Tarifa along the Spit to the Lizard point.

"I was certain of one thing: that no Captain Warriner had come aboard at Falmouth. So if the Tarifa kept out to sea, why, there was no Captain Warriner to come aboard, and here was I spending my last pounds in running down a will-o'-the-wisp, and the world to face again to-morrow in the grim old way, without a penny to my purse. On the other hand, if there was a Captain Warriner, he would come aboard with the cargo somewhere that night, and I fancied I could lay my finger on that somewhere. I had another cause for anxiety. Grant my guess-work correct, and the last thing the Tarifa was likely to hanker after would be a wasp of a steam launch buzzing in her wake. The evening was hazy, by a stroke of luck, but the wind was light and the sea smooth, and my propeller throbbed out over the water until I thought it must reverberate across the world, and the Esquimaux on Franz Josef Land and the Kanaka in the Pacific would hear it plain as the pulsing of a battleship. However, I slowed the launch down to less than half-speed, and the crew of the Tarifa made no account of me. The brigantine was doing only a leisurely five knots--she was waiting for the dark, I conjectured. Conjectured? I came near to praying it. And as if in answer to my prayer--it sounds pretty much like blasphemy now, doesn't it?--but at that moment I believed it--all at once her red light vanished and my heart went jumping in the inside of me as though it had slipped its moorings. For the Tarifa had changed her course; she was pointing closer to the wind and the wind came offshore; she was showing me her stern instead of her port beam; on the course she was lying now she couldn't clear the Manacles--not by any manner of means. She was heading for the anchorage I hoped she would; she was standing in towards Helford river. In a little she went about, and seeing her green light, I slowed down again. I could afford to take it easy."

He drew a breath of relief and lolled back upon his seat. Miranda no longer put questions; there was a look of discouragement upon her face; she began bitterly to feel herself helpless in this man's hands, as clay under the potter's thumb.

"Do you know the creek?" he asked, and did not wait for an answer. "I hadn't anchored there for twenty years, but I had a chart of it in my memories." His voice softened, with perhaps some recollection of a yachting trip in the days before his life had grown sour. "Steep hills on each side, and on each side woods. The trees run down and thrust their knees into the water like animals at their watering places of an evening. A mile or so up, a little rose and honeysuckle village nestles as pretty as a poem. There's a noise of birds all day, and all night and day the trees talk. Given a westerly wind, and the summer, I don't know many places which come up to Helford river," and his voice ceased, and he sat in a muse. A movement at his side recalled him. "But that's not business, you say," he resumed briskly. "I left the Tarifa at the mouth of the creek. The little village a mile or more up is on the southward side; opposite to it, on the Falmouth side, is the coast-guard station; nearer to the mouth, and still on the Falmouth side, a tiny dingle shelters a school-house and half-a-dozen cottages, and still nearer, the road from Falmouth comes over the brow of the hill and dips down along the hill-side. At one point the steep hill-side is broken, there's an easy incline of sand and bushes and soil between the water and the road. The incline is out of sight of the coast-guard. Besides, it is only just round the point and close to the sea. And for that reason I was in no particular hurry to follow the Tarifa. I edged the launch close in under the point, waded ashore, and scrambled along in the dark until I reached the break in the hill-side. Then I lay down among the bushes and waited. All lights were out on the Tarifa, but I could see her hull dimly, a blot of solid black against the night's unsubstantial blackness. I waited for centuries and æons. There was neither moon nor any star. At last I heard a creaking sound that came from the other end of the world. It was repeated, it grew louder, it became many sounds, the sounds or cart wheels on the dry road. I looked at my watch; the glimmer of its white face made it possible for me to tell the hour. It was five minutes to eleven. For five minutes the sounds drew infinitesimally nearer. Higher up the creek six bells were struck upon a yacht, and then over the waters from the direction of the Tarifa came cautiously the wooden rattle of oars in the rowlocks of a boat. A boat, I say, but it was followed by another and another. The three boats grounded on the sand as the carts reached the break in the hill-side. There were few words spoken, and no light shown. I lay in the bushes straining my ears to catch a familiar voice, my eyes on the chance that a match might be struck and light up a familiar face."

"Well?" said Miranda, breaking in upon his speech. She was strung to a high pitch or excitement, and her face and voice betrayed it.

"I was disappointed," replied Wilbraham, "but I saw something of the cargo which the waggons brought over the hill and the boats carried on board. Backwards and forwards between the Tarifa and the shore they were rowed with unremitting diligence and caution, carrying first longish packing-cases of some weight, as I could gather from the conduct of the men who stumbled with them down the incline. And after the packing-cases, square boxes, yet more unwieldy than the long cases, if one takes the proportion of size. The morning was breaking before the last boat was hoisted on board, and the last waggon had creaked out of hearing over the hill."

"And what was the cargo?" asked Miranda.

"That was the question which troubled me," replied Wilbraham. "I lay on the hill-side in the chill of the morning as disheartened a man as you can imagine. Through a break in the bushes I watched the Tarifa below me, her decks busy with the movement of her crew and from her galley the comfortable smoke coiling up into the air. Breakfast! A Gargantuan appetite suddenly pinched my stomach. Had Warriner gone on board with the cargo? And what was the cargo? And into what harbour would the Tarifa carry it? I had found out nothing. Then on board the brigantine men gathered at the windlass, a chain clinked musically as the anchor was hove short, the gaff of her mainsail creaked up the mast, and the festoons of her canvas were unfolded. The Tarifa was outward bound and I had discovered nothing. I was like a man tied hand and foot and a treasure within his reach. I had had my fingers on the treasure. Again the chain rattled on the windlass; she broke out her foresail and her jib; I saw the water sparkle under her foot and stream out a creaming pennant in her wake. I had lost. In the space of a second I lived through every minute of my last fifteen years and their dreary vicissitudes. I lived in anticipation through another fifteen similar in every detail, and fairly shuddered to think there might be another fifteen still to follow those. I stretched myself out and ground my face in the sand and cursed God with all my heart for the difference between man and man. And meanwhile the Tarifa, with a hint of the sun upon her topsails, slipped out over the tide to sea."

Wilbraham's face was quite convulsed by the violence of his recollections; and with so vivid a sincerity, with a voice so mutable, had he described the growth and extinction of his hopes, that Miranda almost forgot their object, almost found herself sympathising with his endeavours, almost regretted their failure--until she remembered that after all he had not failed, or he would not have been sitting beside her in the Alameda.

"Well," she said in a hard voice, "you failed. What then?"

"I crawled down to my launch, the cheapest man in the United Kingdom. My engineer was muffled up in a pilot jacket and uncommon surly and cheap too. I hadn't the pluck left in me to resent his impudence, and we crept back to Falmouth. All the way I was pestered with that question, 'What was the cargo I had seen shipped that night in Helford river?' I couldn't get it out of my head. The propeller lashed it out with a sort of vindictiveness. The little waves breaking ashore whispered about it, as though they knew very well, but wouldn't peach. When I had landed in Falmouth, I found that I was walking towards the Free Library. The doors, however, were still closed. I breakfasted in a fever of impatience and was back again at the doors before they were opened. You may take it from me, Mrs. Warriner, I was the first student inside the building that morning. I read over again every scrap of news and comment about the inquest in Scilly which I could pester the Librarian to unearth; and points which in my hurry I had overlooked before, began to take an air of importance. The old man Fournier, for instance; it seemed sort of queer that a taxidermist of Tangier should come all the way to Scilly for a month's holiday. Eh, what? What was old man Fournier doing at Scilly? Scilly's a likely place for wrecks. Was old man Fournier a hanger-on upon chance, a nautical Mr. Micawber waiting for a wreck to turn up which would suit his purpose? Or had he stage-managed by some means or other the coup de theater on Rosevear? It seemed funny that the short-sighted man should spot the wreck on Rosevear before the St. Agnes men, eh? Suppose M. Fournier and Ralph Warriner were partners in that pretty cargo! I walked straight out of that library, feeling quite certain that I held the right end of the skein. I had made a mistake in following up Warriner. I ought to have followed up the taxidermist. I walked about Falmouth all that day puzzling the business out; and I came to the conclusion that the sooner I crossed to the Scillies the better. I was by this time fairly excited, and I think I should have spent my last farthing in the hunt even if I had known that when I had run the mystery to earth, it would not profit me at all. I took a train that very evening, and pottered about from station to station all night. In the morning I got to Penzance, and kicked my heels on the wharf of the little dock there until nine o'clock, when the Lyonnesse started for St. Mary's. Three hours later I saw the islands hump themselves up from the sea, and I stared and stared at them till a genial being standing beside me said, 'I suppose you haven't been home for a good many years.'--By the way, Mrs. Warriner," he suddenly broke off, "I have heard that natural sherry is a drink in some favour hereabouts. I can't say that it's a beverage I have ever hankered after before, but what with the sun and the talk, the thought of it is at the present moment most seductive. What if we rang down the curtain for ten minutes and had an entr'acte, eh? Would you mind?" And Wilbraham rose from his seat.

"No," said Miranda. "Please finish what you have to say now."

Wilbraham sighed, resumed his seat and at the same time his story.

CHAPTER VIII

[EXPLAINS THE MYSTERY OF THE "TARIFA'S" CARGO]

"At St. Mary's," he continued, "I called at once upon the doctor. 'Ah,' said he, 'liver, I suppose.'

"'Permanently enlarged by excessive indulgence in alcohol,' said I. 'I had once a very dear friend in the same case called Ralph Warriner.'"

Here Miranda interrupted with considerable indignation. "There is not a word of truth in that."

"There is not," Wilbraham agreed pleasantly; "but I had to introduce the subject some way, and my way was successful. 'Ralph Warriner!' exclaimed the doctor. 'And what was he dismissed the service for?' I winked very slowly, with intense cunning; 'I understand,' said the doctor, with a leer, though Heaven only knows what he did understand; I fancy he thought his reputation as a man of the world was at stake. After that the conversation went on swimmingly.

"I was more than ever convinced that the discovery on Rosevear was a put-up job. If so, old man Fournier must have been aware of that wreck before he discovered it. He must have landed on the island and shoved those papers into the dead man's pocket; and someone must have sailed him out to the island. I determined to lay myself out to discover who that someone was; but I went no farther than the determination. There was not indeed any need that I should, for I sailed myself the next day to Rosevear. I hired the St. Agnes lugger, and Zebedee Isaacs, as he sat at the tiller, gave me news of old man Fournier. Old man Fournier was a desperate coward on the sea, yet he had put out to the Bishop on a most unpleasing day. It was old man Fournier who insisted that they should run through the Neck and examine Rosevear, and when Zebedee Isaacs declined the risk, old man Fournier flung himself in a passion on the tiller and nearly swamped the boat. All very queer, eh? M. Fournier must have had some fairly strong motive to nerve him to that pitch of audacity. And what that motive was I should discover when I discovered the nature of the Tarifa's cargo. I thought perpetually about that cargo, all the way to Rosevear, and after I had landed on that melancholy island. The truth came upon me in a moment of inspiration. The ground I remember gave way under my foot. I had trodden on a sea-bird's nest and stumbled forward on my knees, and with the shock of the stumble came the inspiration. I remained on my knees, with the gulls screaming overhead, and the grey wastes of ocean moaning about the unkindly rocks. And I knew! The taxidermist from Tangier, the longish packing-cases, the square boxes--Ralph Warriner and old man Fournier were running guns and ammunition into Morocco!"

Miranda could not repress an exclamation. She had no doubt that Wilbraham was right; the theory fitted in with Ralph's adventurous character. M. Fournier no doubt made the arrangements, and provided the capital; Ralph worked the cargo across from England to Morocco. And to make it safe for himself to venture upon English soil, he had altered the rig of the Tarifa in some unfrequented port, and somehow arranged the deception concerning his death.

"You think as I thought in Rosevear," said Wilbraham, looking shrewdly into her face. "I only wish you could participate in the delight I felt. I had my fingers on the secret now, and it was such a perfect, profitable secret, for, quite apart from the other affair, gun-running in Morocco is itself an offence against the law. I fairly hugged myself. 'Ambrose,' said I, 'never in all your puff have you struck anything like this. Fouché you shall trample under foot and Sherlock Holmes shall be your washpot; you are the best in the world. The faceless mariner was a fraud, a freak from Barnum's. Here at last is Eldorado, and there's no fly anywhere upon the gilding.' Thus, Mrs. Warriner, I soliloquised, and took the next boat back to Penzance; from Penzance I travelled by train to Plymouth; from Plymouth I sailed in an Orient boat to Gib, and from Gib I crossed to Tangier, where I had a few minutes' conversation with one or two officers of the custom-house.

"Morocco as a social institution has many points of convenience which it is useful for men like Warriner and myself to know. Here's a small case in point. If you wish to smuggle forbidden goods into the country, you hire the custom-house officials to unload your cargo for you at night somewhere on the beach. Thus you avoid much trouble, all chance of detection and you secure skilled workmen. I had no doubt that Warriner had followed this course. So I hired the custom-house officials to tell me the truth, and out it came. The Tarifa had landed its cargo in the bay a mile and a half from Tangier a couple of days before I arrived, and M. Fournier had supervised the unloading, and the captain of the Tarifa was no longer the grizzled sea-dog, Mr. Thomas Discipline, but a gentleman of a slight figure, blue eyes, and fair hair. That middle-aged cherub, in a word, with whom you and I are both familiar, and who now calls himself Mr. Jeremy Bentham. When I had derived this information I walked into M. Fournier's shop and bought a stuffed jackal. There was a tourist making purchases, so I asked my question quietly as I leaned my elbows on the counter.

"'How did you work the situation on Rosevear?' said I, 'and how's my sweet friend, Ralph Warriner?'

"The little Frenchman turned white and sick. He babbled expostulations and denials. He demanded my name--"

"You gave him your card, I hope," interrupted Miranda, biting her lip. Wilbraham gazed at her with admiration. "Well, you have got some spirit. I will say that for you, Mrs. Warriner."

"I am not in need of testimonials," said Miranda. "What of M. Fournier?"

"He talked to me mysteries after that. 'You were in Tangier a month ago,' said he. 'You shouted "Look out!" through the door; you startled a friend of mine; you are a coward.' Would you believe it, the little worm turned? He flew into a violent passion; I suppose it was in just such a passion that he flung himself on Zebedee Isaacs at Scilly. A plucky little man for all his cowardice! He called me a number of ill names. However, I had got what I wanted. I crossed back to Gibraltar, and here I am."

Wilbraham crossed his legs, and with a polite "You will permit me?" lighted a cigarette.

"I see," said Miranda, with a contemptuous droop of her lips. "Having failed to blackmail M. Fournier and my husband, you fall back upon blackmailing a woman."

Wilbraham's answer to the sneer was entirely unexpected, even by Miranda, who was prepared for the unexpected in this man. He showed no shame; he did not try to laugh away the slur; but removing his cigarette from his mouth, he turned deliberately his full face to her and in a deliberate voice said: "I do not take the conventional view upon these matters. And, all other things being equal, had I to choose between a man and a woman, I should spare the man and strike the woman."

He spoke without any bitterness, but in a hard, calm voice, as though he had sounded the question to the bottom. Miranda gasped, the words for a second took her breath away, and then the blood came warmly into her cheeks, and her eyes softened and brightened and she smiled. A sudden glory seemed to illuminate her face. Wilbraham wondered why. He could not know that the brutal shock of his speech had sent her thoughts winging back to a balcony overlooking St. James's Park, where a man had held a torn glove in his hand and in a no less decided voice than Wilbraham's had spoken quite other words.

"I never intended to address either Fournier or your husband upon the subject of--shall we call it compensation? At the best I should have got a lump sum now and again from them, and as I say, I have learnt my lesson. If I had a lump sum, it would be spent, and I should again be penniless. I apply to you because I propose a regular sum per annum paid quarterly in advance."

Miranda was still uplifted by the contrast between her recollections and Wilbraham's words. She had the glove at home locked up, an evidence that succour was very near--a hundred miles only down the winding valley which faced her--and she had not even to say a word in order to command it. When she spoke again to Wilbraham she spoke emboldened by this knowledge.

"And what if I were to refuse you even a shilling for your dinner?"

"I should be compelled to lay my information before the proper authorities, that Ralph Warriner is alive and may at times be captured in England."

"Would you be surprised to hear that Mr. Warriner committed no crime for which he could be captured?"

"I should be surprised beyond words. Mr. Warriner sold the mechanism of the Daventry gun to a foreign government."

"Are you so sure of that?"

"I was his agent."

"You! Then you are also his accomplice."

"True,--and I look forward to turning Queen's evidence."

Miranda withdrew from the contest. The discussion was hardly more than academic, for she knew both that her husband was alive and that this particular crime he had committed.

"What is your price?" she asked, and she sat down upon the bench.

Wilbraham did not immediately reply. He took a pocket-book from his coat and a letter from the pocket-book.

"I should wish you fully to understand the strength of my position," he said. "This letter you will see is in your husband's handwriting. This passage," and he folded the letter to show Miranda a line or two, "enjoins me to be very careful about the plans. The gun is not mentioned by name, but the date of the letter and the context leave no possible doubt."

He fluttered the letter under Miranda's eyes and within reach of her fingers.

"It is my one piece of evidence, but a convincing piece."

He made a pretence of dropping it at her feet and snatched it up quickly. Then he replaced it in his pocket-book and shut up his pocket-book with a snap.

"Why didn't you snatch at it?" he exclaimed with irritation.

"Why did you wish me to snatch at it?" she replied.

"Because--because," he said angrily, "you have made me feel real mean, as mean as a man in the commission of his first dishonourable act towards a woman, and I wanted you to look mean at all events; it would have made my business easier to handle. Well, let's have done with it. I know Ralph Warriner is alive. I can give information which may lead to his capture; and there's always the disgrace to publish."

He blurted out the words, ashamed and indignant with her for the shame he felt. Miranda, in spite of herself, was touched by Wilbraham's manner, and she answered quite gently: "Very well. I will buy your silence."

"Coals of fire!" he replied with a sneer. Miranda understood that he was defying her to make him feel ashamed. "Is that the ticket, Mrs. Warriner? It won't lessen the amount of the per annum I can assure you. What I propose is to live for the future in some more or less quiet hole, where none of my acquaintances are likely to crop up. Tarifa occurred to me; for one thing I can reach you from Tarifa; for another I can do the royal act at Tarifa on a moderate income; for a third it is a quiet place where I can have a shot at--well, at what I want to do," and his voice suddenly became shy. She looked at him and he coloured under her glance, and he shifted in his seat and laughed awkwardly.

Miranda was familiar with those signs and what they signified. Wilbraham wanted her to ask him to confide in her. Many men at Gibraltar had brought their troubles to her in just this way, with just these marks of diffidence, this fear that the troubles would bore her. She had been called upon to play the guardian-angel at times and had not shrunk from the responsibility, though she had accepted it with a saving modesty of humour at the notion of herself playing the guardian-angel to any man.

"What is it you want to do?" she asked, and Wilbraham confided in her. The position was strange, no doubt. Here was a woman whom he had bullied, whom he meant to rob, and on whom he meant to live until he died, and he was confiding in her. But the words tumbled from his lips and he did not think of the relationship in which he stood to her. He was only aware that for fifteen years he had not shared a single one of his intimate thoughts with either man or woman, and he was surcharged with them. Here was a woman, frank, reliable, who asked for his confidence, and he gave it, with a schoolboy's mixture of eagerness and timidity.

"Do you know," said he, "the Odes of Horace have never been well translated into English verse by anyone? Some people have done an ode or two very well, perhaps as well as it could be done--Hood for instance tried his hand at it. But no one has done them all, with any approach to success. And yet they ought to be capable of translation. Perhaps they aren't--I don't know--perhaps they are too wonderfully perfect. Probably I should make an awful hash of the job; but I think I should like to have a shot. I began years and years ago when I was an attaché at Paris, and--and I have always kept the book with me; but one has had no time." As he spoke he drew from his side pocket a little copy of Horace in an old light-brown cover of leather very much frayed and scratched. "Look," said he, and half stretched it out to her, as though doubtful whether he should put it into her hands or refuse to let her take it at all. She held out her hand, and he made up his mind and gave it into her keeping.

The copy was dated 1767; the rough black type, in which all the s's looked like f's, was margined by paper brown with age and sullied with the rims of tumblers and the stains of tobacco; and this stained margin was everywhere written over with ink in a small fine hand.

"You see I have made a sort of ground-work," said Wilbraham, with a deprecating laugh, as though he feared Miranda would ridicule his efforts. The writing consisted of tags of verse, half-lines, here and there complete lines, and sometimes, though rarely, a complete stanza. "You must not judge by what you see there," he made haste to add. "All I have written on the margin is purely tentative; probably it's no good at all." Miranda turned over a page and came upon one ode completely translated. "I did that," explained Wilbraham, "one season when I shipped as a hand on a Yarmouth smack. We got bad weather on the Dogger Bank, out in the North Sea at Christmas. We spent a good deal of time hove to with the wheel lashed, and on night-watches I used to make up the verses. Indeed, those night-watches seem the only time I have had free during the last fifteen years. The rest of the time--well, I have told you about it. I got through one complete ode out in the North Sea, and did parts of others."

Mrs. Warriner began to read the ode. "May I?" she asked.

"Of course," said he, with a flush of pleasure, and he watched her most earnestly for the involuntary signs of approval or censure. But her face betrayed neither the one nor the other; and he was quick to apologise for the ode's shortcomings.

"You mustn't think that I had a great deal of time on those night-watches. For one thing we did not get over-much sleep on the voyage, and so one's brains no doubt were a trifle dull. Besides, there were always seas combing up above the bows and roaring along the deck. You had to keep your eyes open for them and scuttle down the companion before they came on board. Otherwise, if the weight of the water took you, it was a case of this way to the pit. The whole hull of the smack disappears, and you just see the foresail sticking up from the hungry, lashing tumble of green water. So, you see, it stands to reason that ode is subject to revision."

But Miranda was not thinking of the ode. She had a vision of the smack labouring on a black night in the trough of a black sea flecked with white, at Christmas time, and a man on the watch, who had been an attaché at Paris, and was, even with the rude sailor-folk for his companions, engaged in translating Horace; and the vision had an exquisite pathos for her.

"What was the beginning of it all?" she asked in a low voice, and since Wilbraham was in the train of confidences, he told her that too.

He told her perhaps more than he meant to tell. It was an old story, the story of the faithless woman and the man who trusts her, and what comes of it all. The story of Helen and Menelaus, but disfigured into a caricature of its original by the paltriness of the characters and the vulgarity of the incidents. The throb of primitive passion was gone from the story, and therefore all dignity too. Subtle and intricate trivialities of sentiment took the place of passion, and made the episode infinitely mean. Menelaus was an attaché at Paris: Helen lived at Knightsbridge, and the pair of them were engaged to be married. Helen was faithless merely through a cheap vanity, and a cheaper pose of wilfulness, and even so she was faithless merely in a low and despicable way. It was an infidelity of innumerable flirtations. She passed from arm to arm without intermission, and almost allowed those who fondled her to overlap. Yet all the day she talked of her pride, and was conscious of no inconsistency between the vulgarity of her conduct and the high words upon her lips. She practised all the small necessary deceits to conceal her various meetings and appointments, and was unaware of the degradation they involved; for still she talked loudly of her pride. And when Menelaus lifted his hat and wished her good-morning, she only felt that she was deeply aggrieved.

Menelaus, however, was in no better case. He had not the strength to thrust her from his mind, but let his thoughts play sensuously with his recollections, until he declined upon a greater and a greater weakness.

"I went back to Paris," continued Wilbraham. "I had good prospects, but they came to nothing. Even now men going in for Mods. have to get up a book which I once wrote, and as for the service, if I were to tell you my real name, it is just possible that you might have heard it, for I was supposed to have done something quite decent at Zanzibar. Well, I went back to Paris. It's a hard thing, you know, to discover that the woman you have been working for, and in a way succeeding for, isn't worth the nicotine at the bottom of your pipe-bowl. At that time I reckon I would rather have been the wreck I am now, and believed it was all my fault, for, you see, I might then have imagined that if I had done all right, I should have won the desirable woman.... Anyway, after I got back to Paris, a little while after, there was trouble." Wilbraham examined his cane and drew diagrams upon the ground. "The woman blabbed, in a moment of confidence ... to her husband. There was a sort of a scandal.... I had to go. I didn't blame the woman who blabbed; no, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed the first woman, the woman in Knightsbridge. Was I right? I came back to England. I was a second son, and my father slammed the door in my face. Then, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed all women, you--you--you amongst the others, even though I didn't know you." He spoke in a gust of extraordinary violence, and so brought his confidences to an end. "Now your income is--" he resumed, and fetched out his pocket-book again. "I made a note about your estate when I was doing business with Warriner," he said. "The note comes in usefully now."

He found the details of which he was in search, and made a neat little sum at the corner of the leaf, to which Miranda paid no attention whatsoever. The queer inclination towards pity which had moved her to ask for his confidence, had been entirely and finally destroyed by the confidence she had asked for. The story was so utterly sordid; the characters in it so utterly puny. Before he told it he had acquired in her eyes even a sort of dignity, the dignity of a man battered and defeated in a battle wherein his wits were unequally matched against the solid forces of order; but in the telling he had destroyed that impression. Miranda had no feeling now but one of aversion for the wreck of a man at her side. She looked at the Horace, which still lay open on her lap, and the contrast between the fine scholar's handwriting and the stains of the pothouse had no longer any power to touch her. She set the book down on the bench, and stood up.

Wilbraham stopped his calculations, and, with the stump of his pencil in his mouth, looked at her alertly and furtively. She took a step or two towards the parapet of the Alameda. Wilbraham instantly laid his pocket-book on the seat with the pencil to mark the place, and without any noise, stood up. Miranda reached the railings at the edge of the gardens and leaned her arms upon it. The next moment she felt a firm grip upon her elbow. She turned round and saw Wilbraham's face ablaze with passion. "I suspected that," he said fiercely, "when first I saw where you had brought me," and he shook her elbow.

"Suspected what?" exclaimed Miranda, and she drew away to free herself from his grasp. Wilbraham's next movement answered her question. For he slipped between her and the railings with a glance at the precipice below.

"But you shall not do it," he continued. "I was robbed that way once before; I'll take care the robbery is not repeated." He leaned his back against the railings and shook his finger at her.

"Besides, there's no sense in it," and he jerked his head backwards to signify the abysm. "You are crying out before you are hurt. You don't even know how much I want; I shan't ruin you. I made a mistake that way once; I had the best secret conceivable, and ran my man down across two continents. Then I was fool enough to put my hand too deep in his sky, and I suppose he thought--well, he blew his brains out that night, and then was I robbed."

Mrs. Warriner stared at him with a growing horror in her eyes. "You murdered him," she said slowly.

"We won't quarrel over words," said Wilbraham, callously.

Miranda walked back to the bench. She was not troubled to explain Wilbraham's misconception of her movement. She was only anxious to be rid of him. "What income do you want?" she asked.

"You have three thousand a year," he returned. "Of that I take it Warriner takes a largish slice."

Miranda flushed. "My husband has never asked for a farthing since the Ten Brothers slipped out of Gibraltar. He has never received a farthing," she said angrily.

"An imprudent remark," said Wilbraham. "I might feel inclined to raise my price."

"At all events you shall not slander him."

Wilbraham looked at her with his head cocked on one side. "You are very loyal," said he, with genuine admiration. "I will not raise my price."

Miranda did not, by any gesture or word, acknowledge his compliment. She stood over against him with a face just as hard and white as he had shown to her.

"I say seven hundred a year," he said briefly. "I will call for it myself every quarter."

"I will send it to you," she interrupted.

"I prefer to call for it," said he; for so he concealed his own address and kept her within his reach. "You will not leave Ronda even for a week without giving me due notice of your destination. I will take a quarter's payment to-day. You draw on a bank in Ronda, I suppose, so a cheque will serve."

"If you will wait here, I will bring you the cheque."

Twenty minutes afterwards she returned with it to the Alameda, where she found Wilbraham seated on the bench with his Horace in his hand. He put down the book awkwardly, and rose. He had the grace to feel some discomfort as he took the cheque, and that discomfort his manner expressed.

Miranda had no word, no look, for him. He stood perhaps for the space of a minute fingering the cheque. Then he said suddenly: "I can't imagine what a woman like you sees in Ralph Warriner to trouble about. In your place I should have let him go his own way, without paying to keep him out of prison."

Miranda kept her reasons to herself, as she had done with the reason of her return to Ronda. She waited for him to go, and he walked sullenly away--for ten yards. Then he returned, for he had left his copy of Horace lying upon the bench. He picked it up with a curious and almost timorous glance of appeal towards Miranda. She did not move but waited implacably for his departure. Wilbraham worked his shoulders in discomfort.

"My clothes don't fit and God hates me," he cried irritably. Then this jack-in-the-box of fortune slunk out of her sight.

CHAPTER IX

[SHOWS THE USE WHICH A BLIND MAN MAY MAKE OF A DARK NIGHT A WEEK]

A week after Wilbraham's departure from Ronda, the night fell very dark at Tangier. In the Sôk outside the city gate, the solitary electric lamp from its tall mast threw a pale light over a circle of the trampled grass, but outside the circle all was black. There was no glimmer in the tents of the shoemakers at the upper corner of the Sôk; nor was there any stir or noise. For it was past midnight and the world was asleep--except at one spot on the hill-side above the Sôk, and a little distance to the right.

There a small villa, standing by itself, shone gaudily in the heart of the blackness. From its open windows a yellow flood of light streamed out, and besides the light, the music of a single violin and the rhythmical beat of feet. There were other noises too, such as the popping of corks, and much laughter.

Outside the villa, and beyond the range of its light, a man and a boy sat patient and silent. The man for his sole clothing wore a sack, but a dark cloak lay on the ground beside him. With his hands he continually tested a cord twisted from palmetto fibres, as though doubtful of its strength. At length the door of the villa opened.

"Who comes out?" asked the man.

"A man and a woman," answered the boy.

"Describe the man to me."

"Big, fat--"

"That is enough."

The man and the woman passed through the little garden of the villa, and walked down across the Sôk towards the city gate. The door opened again and again. There was a continual sound of leave-taking in different languages, mostly German and French, and between the man and the boy the same dialogue was repeated and repeated. Some wore evening dress, others did not. Some walked across the Sôk, others rode.

"They are all gone," said the boy.

"Wait," commanded the man.

"They are putting out the lights."

"Are all the lights out?"

"No, one light is burning."

"Wait!"

The door opened again, and two men in evening dress came out on to the steps.

"There are two men," said the boy, "but only one wears a hat."

"Describe him to me."

"He is not tall, he is thin, but I cannot see his face for his hat."

"Look! look well!"

"He goes back into the house. He takes off his hat. Wait! He is smoking. He strikes a match and holds it to his mouth. I can see him now."

"Well! Of what colour is his hair?"

"Very fair--yellow. His face is round, his eyes are light."

The man in the sack ceased from his questions, but he gave no sign of either approval or disappointment. He sat still in the darkness until a voice from the little garden cried out with a French accent: "I cannot think what has come to the beast. He has got loose. And he was hobbled, Jeremy. You did hobble him, hein?"

The boy began to laugh. "The little fat Christian is looking for the mule in the garden," said he. "Hush!" whispered the man, laying his hand upon the boy's mouth. "Listen! What does the other answer? Listen for his voice."

"He does not answer," returned the boy. "He leans against the door, and smokes and waits, while the little fat Room searches for the mule."

"Help to find the mule!"

The boy laughed again, rose from the ground, and disappeared into the darkness. In a few minutes he returned, driving the mule in front of him. He drove it through the wicket of the garden. A few words passed between the little Frenchman and the boy. Then the boy came back to the man seated patiently outside the rim of the villa's lights.

"What did he say to thee?" said the man.

"He asked me if I had stolen the hobbles."

"And thou didst answer?"

"That I knew nothing of the hobbles. I said that I had found the mule loose in the Sôk, and seeing the lights, brought it to the house."

"It is well. Now go, my son; go home and sleep, and forget the hours we have waited in the darkness outside the villa of the Room. Forget, so that in the morning they shall never have been. Go! God will reward thee!"

The boy turned upon his heel, and ran down towards the town. The man was left alone. He remained squatting on the ground. He heard the French voice exclaim: "Good-night, Jeremy."

But no answering voice returned the wish. Jeremy indeed contented himself with a careless nod of the head, mounted his mule, and passed out of the wicket gate. Jeremy passed within ten yards of the man seated upon the ground, who heard the padding of the mule's feet upon the grass and smelt the cigar.

He did not move, however. A road ran between this stretch of grass and the Sôk beyond, and he waited until the mule's hooves rang upon it. Then he picked up the dark cloak by his side and ran swiftly and noiselessly down the grass, across the road, over the trampled Sôk. Ahead of him he heard the leisurely amble of the mule.

"Stop!" he cried out in the Moghrebbin dialect. "I have the hobbles of the most noble one."

He heard the mule stop, and ran lightly forward.

"Who is it?" asked Jeremy, in the same tongue, as he bent round in his saddle.

"Hassan Akbar," cried the other, leaping at the point from which the voice came. "Bentham, it is Hassan Akbar."

The man addressed as Bentham turned quickly in his saddle with a cry and gathered up the reins; but he was too late. Even the cry was stifled upon his lips. For Hassan threw the cloak over his head, gathered it in tight round his neck, and still holding him by the neck, dragged him out of the saddle and flung him on to the ground. Bentham, half-throttled, half-stunned, lay for a moment or two upon his back, limp and unresisting. When he came to himself, it was no longer within his power to resist, for Hassan knelt straddled across his body, pinning him to the ground with the weight of his stature. One bony knee pressed upon his chest insufferably. Bentham's ribs cracked under it; he felt that his ribs were being driven into his lungs. The other knee held down his thighs, and while he lay there incapable of defence, Hassan bound his arms tightly together with the cord of palmetto fibres.

Bentham tried to shout, but the cloak was over his mouth: the knee was grinding and boring into his chest, and his shout was an exiguous wail which, when it had penetrated the cloak, was no more than a sigh. He waited for the moment when the knee would be removed, and waited motionless without a twitch of his muscles, so that Hassan might be deceived into the belief that he had swooned, and remove his knee and the cloak.

Hassan removed his knees, bent down to Bentham, twined one arm about his legs, thrust the other underneath his neck, and lifted him from the ground as though he was a child. Bentham was now less able to shout than before, for the hand of the arm which was about his neck pressed the cloak close upon his mouth.

Bentham struggled for his breath; Hassan's arms only tightened their grip and held him like a coil of wire. An utter terror seized upon Bentham. He remembered the darkness of the night, the lateness of the hour, the silence of the Sôk, and from the manner of Hassan's walk, he knew that he was being carried up the hill and away from Tangier. He was helpless in the hands of a Moor whom he had irreparably wronged. Death he knew he must expect; the question which troubled him was what kind of death.

Hassan's foot struck against a rope drawn tight across his path, and in Bentham hope for a moment revived. The rope was the stay of a tent, no doubt. What if Hassan had lost his way and stumbled among the tents of the shoemakers? But Hassan loosened the grip of the arm which held his legs, and Bentham heard him fumbling with his hand for the door-flap of the tent. Plainly Hassan had not missed his way.

Hassan dropt him on the ground, thrust him through the small opening, and crawled in after him. Then he knelt beside Bentham, turned back the cloak from his face, but tied it securely about his mouth. Bentham could now see, and the flap of the tent was open. The tent was indeed one of the low, tiny gunny-bag tents of the shoemakers, but it was set far apart from that small cluster, as Bentham recognized in despair, for through the aperture he could see a long way below him and a long way to his right the electric light in the middle of the Sôk.

Outside the tent there was a sound of something moving. Bentham sat up and tore at his gag with his bound hands.

"Why cry for help to a mule?" said Hassan, calmly. "Will a mule help thee?" He leaned forward and tightened the knot which fastened the cloak at the back of his head. Then he crawled out of the tent and Bentham heard him tethering the mule to one of the tent-pegs.

Bentham was thus left alone. He had a few seconds, and he had at once to determine what use he would make of those seconds. There was not enough time wherein to free his hands. It would have been sheer waste of time to free his mouth from the cloak. For none was within earshot of that tent who would be concerned to discover the reason of a cry, and the cry would not be repeated, since Hassan outside the tent was still within arm's reach.

Instead, he hitched and worked his white waistcoat upwards from the bottom, leaning forward the while, until his watch fell from the pocket and dangled on the end of the chain; after his watch a metal pencil-case rolled out and dropped between his knees. One of the two things he meant to do was done. Hassan had bound his hands not palm to palm, but wrist across wrist; and raising his hands he was able with the tips of his right-hand fingers to feel in the left-hand breast-pocket of his dress-coat. His fingers touched a small pocket-book, opened it, and plucked out a leaf of paper. This leaf and the pencil-case he secreted in the palm of his hand.

Hassan crawled back into the tent and closed the flap. Bentham, with his knees drawn up to his chin, crouched back against the wall of the tent. Now that the flap was closed, it was pitch-dark; that, however, made no difference to Hassan Akbar, who lived in darkness, and out of the darkness his voice spoke.

"The ways of God are very wonderful. You gave me this tent. With the dollar you dropped on my knees at the gate of the cemetery, I bought this tent and set it up here apart, to keep you safe for the little time before you start upon your journey."

Bentham took no comfort from the passionless voice, though his heart leaped at the words. He was not then to be killed. He did not answer Hassan, but remained crouched in his corner.

"Now the dog of a Christian will speak," said Hassan, quietly. Bentham made no movement. Hassan crawled towards him, felt his feet, his up-drawn knees, and reaching his face untied the cloak from his mouth. "Now the dog of a Christian will speak," he repeated softly, in a low gentle voice, "so that I may know it is indeed Bentham, who took shelter with me at Tangier, and ate of my kouss-kouss, and thereafter betrayed me."

Bentham did not reply. If Hassan had a doubt, then it was his part to make the most of it to prolong the solution of the doubt, to defer it, if it might be, till the morning came. This was summer--July--the morning comes early in July, not so early as in June, but still early. Would that this had happened one month back!

Hassan kneeled upon his hams by Bentham's side. "Will not the dog of a Christian speak?" he asked in a wheedling voice, which daunted and chilled the man he spoke to. "Let us see!" And again his sinuous hands lingered and stole over Bentham's face. The thumbs lingered about Bentham's eyes.

Bentham shivered; but still, though the desire to shout, to curse, to relieve by some violence, if only of speech, the tension he was suffering, was strong, he mastered himself, he held his tongue, for if once he did speak he betrayed himself. His only chance lay in Hassan's doubt, which lived upon his silence. Again Hassan's fingers returned to his face. Bentham closed his eyes; the thumbs touched and retouched them, now pressing gently upon the eyeballs, now working about the corners of the sockets. Finally Hassan snatched his hands away. "If I did that," he murmured, "they would not take him, for he would fetch no price;" and Bentham understood the fate which was in store for him--if he spoke.

Hassan left his side, and was busy in a corner of the tent, at what Bentham could not for the moment discover. He heard a cracking of twigs; what was to follow? One instant he dreaded, the next he burned to know, and all the while he shivered with terror. Hassan struck a match and lit the twigs, and breathed upon the little blue flames, until they warmed to yellow, and spirted up into a fire.

Bentham watched Hassan's gaunt, disfigured, inexpressive face, as he crouched over the twigs, and his terror increased. He saw that he held something in each hand, something that flashed bright, like a disk of iron. Hassan laid the disks upon the twigs; they were the hobbles which Bentham had placed upon his mule early that evening.

Bentham began to count the seconds; at any moment the morning might begin to break, surely, surely. As he watched the hobbles growing hot and the sparks dance upon the iron, he continued to count the seconds, not knowing what he did, and at an incredible speed.

Hassan picked up the hobbles, each with a cleft stick, and brought them over to Bentham. "Now the dog of a Christian will speak," said he.

Bentham summoned all his courage, all his strength, and was silent. Hassan reached out his hands, and drew his legs from under him, and fitted the hobbles over his slippers, and fixed them round his ankles like a pair of fetters.

Bentham uttered a cry--it was almost a scream--as the iron burnt into his flesh. He kicked, he struggled to free his legs, to free his hands; but Hassan Akbar dragged him forward, thrust him down upon his back, and pinned his shoulders to the ground. Bentham could do no more than vainly writhe in convulsive movements of his limbs. The hot iron rings clung to his ankles; the smoke from the wood fire choked him; the smell of burning flesh was acrid in his nostrils. Agony redoubled his strength, but even so, he was too crippled, and Hassan's grasp upon his shoulders did not relax.

In the end Hassan had his heart's desire, and Bentham spoke. He spoke too in the low voice which Hassan enjoined, though he used it without thought to obey,--low, voluble, earnest prayers for mercy, and then again voluble curses, and again voluble appeals for pity, and at the end of it a broken whimpering, as though his strength was gone, and the convulsive jerks which a fish makes in a basket.

All the while Hassan held him down, listening to the appeals, the prayers, the curses, with an untouched gravity of face. "It is indeed you; I have made no mistake," and he freed him from the burning fetters, and opened the flap of the tent. Bentham rolled over on his side with his face to the opening, and lay there shaking, moaning. "Now I will tell you what I have planned for you," continued Hassan. "I thought at first to kill you, but it is so small a thing. Then I remembered words you once told me, that you had trouble with your own people, and could not ask them for protection. So friends of mine from Beni Hassan, who go upon their way to-night, will take you with them, and sell you when they are far away. And for the rest of your days you will carry loads upon your back up and down the inlands of Morocco, and your masters will beat you, and if you faint and are tired, they will do strange things to make you suffer, even as I did with the hobbles. Lo, here my friends come!"

The sound of steps came to their ears. A few moments later a hand fumbled at the flap of the tent, opened it, and a head was thrust in. "Is it you, Hassan Akbar?"

"Yes," replied Hassan; "and here is the Room whom you promised to take out of my path. He will fetch a price, and besides I give to you his mule, which you will find tethered to the tent."

"And the saddle too, Hassan, is it not so?"

"It is."

Meanwhile Hassan cut Bentham's clothes from him as he lay upon the ground, and taking off his own sack, cast it for a garment over Bentham's shoulders, and wrapped himself in the dark cloak. In the place of that cloak he tied over Bentham's mouth a thick rag. Then he thrust him out of the tent, and jerked him on to his feet. Bentham made no longer any resistance; he let them do with him as they were pleased; and he stood tottering and swaying.

Five Arabs waited outside the tent. "He cannot walk, he shall ride the mule this night," said the chief of them. "To-morrow he shall learn to walk."

They hoisted Bentham on to the back of the mule, and tied him there with leathern thongs. Then they started on their long journey.

The cool night air after the stifling tent revived the man who perforce rode the mule. It did not give him strength to resist, or as yet even the impulse to cry out; but it restored to him the power to hear and to understand. What he heard was a distant clock below him in Tangier striking an hour; what he understood was that the hour it struck was only one o'clock.

CHAPTER X

[M. FOURNIER EXPOUNDS THE ADVANTAGES WHICH EACH SEX HAS OVER THE OTHER]

The long interview with Wilbraham in the Alameda of Ronda had consequences for Miranda which she felt but did not trace to their source. It was not merely that she sickened at the vulgar, futile story of his ruin; that she saw in imagination the wretched victim he had run to earth across two continents, closing the door and slipping the pistol-barrel between his teeth; that she loathed the knowledge that this man was henceforward her gaoler; but she took him and the bitter years of her marriage together in her thoughts, and using them as premisses began doubtfully to draw universal conclusions.

These conclusions Miranda hazarded at times in the form of questions to her companion Jane Holt, and sought answers from her as from one who had great experience of the tortuous conduct of men. Were men trustworthy at all? If so, were there any means by which a woman could test their trustworthiness? These two questions were the most constant upon Miranda's tongue, and Jane Holt answered them with assurance, and in her own way.

Wilbraham had not erred when he described her as a sentimentalist with grievances. Sentimentalism was the shallows of her nature, and she had no depths. Her conversation ran continually upon the "big things," as she termed them, such as devotion, endurance, self-sacrifice, and the rest, in which qualities men were singularly deficient. She meant, however, only devotion to her, endurance of her, self-sacrifice for her, of which it was not unnatural that men should tire, seeing who it was that demanded them. Yet she had enjoyed her share, and more than her share. For though incapable of passion herself, she had in her youth possessed the trick of inspiring it, but without the power, perhaps through her own incapacity, of keeping it alive, and no doubt too because upon a moderate acquaintance she conveyed an impression of inherent falsity. For, being a sentimentalist, she lived in a false world, on the borders of a lie, never quite telling it perhaps, and certainly never quite not telling it. She was by nature exigent, for she was in her own eyes the pivot of her little world, and for the wider world beyond, she had no eyes whatever. And her exigence took amusing or irritating shapes according to the point of view of those who suffered it. For instance, you must never praise her costumes, of which she had many, and those worthy of praise, but the high qualities of her mind, which were few and often of no taste whatever. It should be added that she had always favoured an inferior before an equal. For it pleased her above all things to condescend, since she secured thus a double flattery, in the knowledge of her own condescension, and in the grateful humility of those to whom she condescended.

It can be foreseen, then, what answers this woman,--who was tall, and still retained the elegance of her figure, and would have still retained the good looks of her face, but that it was written upon by many grievances--would give to Miranda's questions.

"You can trust no men. You must bribe them with cajoleries; you must play the coquette; you must enlist their vanity. They are all trivial, and the big things do not appeal to them."

Miranda listened. She was accustomed to Jane Holt, and had no longer a reasoned conception of her character. Habit had dulled her impressions. She remembered only that Jane Holt had had much experience of men wherein she herself was wofully deficient. Jane Holt embroidered her theme; a pretty display of petulance, the seemingly accidental disclosure of an ankle, a voluntary involuntary pressure of the arm, these things had power to persuade the male mind, such as it is, and to enmesh that worthless thing the male heart.

"One might have a man for a friend, perhaps," suggested Miranda, hopefully.

"My poor Miranda!" exclaimed Miss Holt. "No wonder your marriage was a failure. Men pretend friendship for a woman at times, but they mean something else."

The moral was always that they were not to be trusted, and Miranda, vividly recollecting Ralph Warriner and Wilbraham, listened and wondered, listened and wondered, until she would rise of a sudden and take refuge in her own parlour, of which the window looked out across the valley to the hills, where she would sit with a throbbing forehead pressed upon her palms, certain, certain, that the homily was not true, and yet half distracted lest it should be true.

On the morrow of one such conversation, and one such flight, Miss Holt came into the little parlour--a cool, dark-panelled, low-roofed room of which the door gave on to the patio--and found Miranda searching the room.

"Do you know what month this is?" Miss Holt asked severely.

"October."

"Quite so," and great emphasis was laid upon the words.

"I know," replied Miranda, penitently, as she crossed over to a table and lifted the books. "We have been here all the summer; it has been very hot. I am sorry, but I was compelled to stay. I did not know what might occur, and," she anxiously turned over the letters and papers on her writing-table in the window, "it was some comfort, I admit, to feel that one was near--" She stopped suddenly and resumed in confusion, "I mean I did not know what might happen."

Jane Holt looked at her with great displeasure, but said nothing until Miranda began hurriedly to open and shut the drawers of her writing-table. Then she said irritably: "What in the world are you looking for?"

Miranda stood up and looked round the room. "There was a glove," she said absently.

"Yes, I threw it away."

"Threw it away!" Miranda stared at Jane Holt with a look of complete dismay. "You don't mean that. Oh, you can't mean it!"

"Indeed I do; it was torn across the palm."

"I left it lying there, on my writing-desk, yesterday, after you and I had been talking--" She left the sentence unfinished.

"Yes, and I found it there. It was torn, so I had it thrown away."

Miranda rang a hand-bell, and ordered search to be made for the glove. It could not be found; it had been burnt with the answered letters.

"Very well," said Miranda, and the servant retired. Miranda sat down, and showed to Jane Holt a face of which the expression was almost scared.

"What does it matter?" exclaimed Jane. "The glove was torn; you could never have used it."

"No," answered Miranda, quickly, almost guiltily it seemed. "I should never have used it; I never meant to use it. The glove was only a symbol; it was no more than that, it represented a belief. I can retain the belief, no doubt. No doubt, though, I have lost the glove--"

"What in the world are you talking about?" interrupted Jane Holt.

"Nothing, nothing," answered Miranda, with a start. The loss of the glove had so dismayed her that she had forgotten who it was she had been speaking to, or indeed that she was speaking to anyone. She had merely uttered her thoughts, for she had come to look upon that glove, which, under no circumstances, would she use, as none the less a safeguard, and of late, in particular, she had fallen into a habit of taking it from the drawer in which it rested and setting it before her eyes; of stating it, as it were, as a refutation of Jane Holt's ready opinions.

Jane Holt shook her head. "You have changed very much towards me, Miranda. You are growing secret. I don't want to know. I would not press anyone for their confidence; but I may think it strange, I suppose?" She folded her arms across her breast and tapped with her fingers upon her elbows. "I suppose I may think it strange; and if anyone took the trouble to give me a thought, perhaps anyone might believe that I had a right to feel hurt. But I don't! Please don't run away with that idea! No, I cannot allow you, Miranda, to fancy for a moment that I should feel hurt. But I do notice that you jump whenever there is a knock at the door. There! What did I say?"

The door of the parlour stood open to the patio; in the corner of the opposite side of the patio there was the mouth of a passage which led to the outer door; and upon that outer door just at this moment someone rapped heavily, as though he came in haste. Miranda started nervously, and to cover the movement, rose from her chair and closed the door.

"And as for the glove," resumed Jane Holt, who found it difficult to leave any subject alone when it was evident that it was unwelcome, "you could never have used it."

"No," answered Miranda, thoughtfully. "Of course--of course, I could never have used it;" and a servant entered the room and handed to her a card on which was engraved M. Fournier's name and address.

Miranda held the card beneath her eyes for some little while. Then she walked out into the patio, where M. Fournier awaited her. He came towards her at once, in an extreme agitation, but she signed to him to be silent, and opening a second door on the same side of the patio as the door of her parlour, but farther to the right, she led the way into a tiny garden rich with deep colours. Jonquils, camellias, roses, wild geraniums, and pinks, tended with a care which bespoke a mistress from another country, made a gay blaze in the sun, and sweetened the air with their delicate perfumes.

The garden was an irregular nook with something or the shape of a triangle, enclosed between the back wall of the house and a wing flung out at a right angle. The base of the triangle was an old brick wall, breast-high, which began at the end of the house wall and curved outwards until it reached the wing. Over this wall the eye looked through air to the olive-planted slope of a mountain. For the house was built on the brink of the precipice, it was in a line with the Alameda, though divided from it by the great chasm, and if one leaned over the crumbling wall built long ago by the Moors, one had an impression that one ought to see the waves churning at the foot of the rock and to hear a faint moaning of the sea; so that the sight of the level carpet of the plain continually surprised the eyes.

Into this garden Miranda brought M. Fournier. No windows overlooked it, for those which gave light to Miranda's parlour were in the end and the other side of the wing, and so commanded the valley without commanding this enclosure. A little flagged causeway opened a path between the flowers to the nook between the wing of the house and the old wall, where two lounge chairs invited use.

Miranda seated herself in one of these chairs and with a gesture offered the other to M. Fournier. M. Fournier, however, took no heed of the invitation. He had eyes only for Miranda's face. He held his hat in one hand, and with a coloured handkerchief continually mopped his forehead, a dusty perspiring image of anxiety.

"You come from my husband?" said Miranda.

M. Fournier's face lightened. "Ah, then, you know--"

"That he is alive? Yes. You come from him?"

"From him, no; on his behalf, yes."

Miranda smiled at the subtle distinction. "You need money, of course," she said drily. "How much do you want? You have, no doubt, some authority from my husband."

The little Belgian's anxiety gave place to offended pride. "We do not need money, neither he nor I; but as for authority, perhaps this will serve."

He drew from his pocket a soiled scrap of paper and handed it to Miranda. The paper, as she could see from the blue lines, the shape, and the jagged border, had been torn from a small pocketbook. It was so crumpled and soiled that a few words scribbled with a pencil on the outside in Arabic were barely visible. Miranda unfolded the paper slowly, for the mere look of it was sinister. The words within were written also in pencil, and her face altered as she read them.

"What does J. B. mean?" she asked.

"J. B. are the initials of the name he took."

"You are sure this comes from my husband? I do not recognise his hand."

"Quite sure."

"Here is bad news," said she, and she conned the words over again, and could nowhere pick out the familiar characteristics of Ralph Warriner's handwriting. The words themselves were startling. Reward the bearer well, and for God's sake do quickly what you can. But more startling, more significant, than the words was the agitation of the writer's hand. Haste and terror had kept the hand wavering. Here the pencil had paused, yet even when pausing, its point had trembled on the paper, as the blurred dots showed. Miranda imagined that so it had paused and trembled, while someone walked by the writer's back and had but to glance over his shoulder to discover the business he was engaged upon. Then again the pencil had raced on, running the words one into the other, fevered to get the message done. A whole tragedy was indicated in the formation of the letters. Or a malady? Miranda turned eagerly to the letter. The writing wavered up and down. The small letters were clear; the capitals and the long letters, the "f's," the "q's," the "y's," weak, as though the fingers could not control the pencil. Illness might account for the message, and Miranda chose that supposition.

"He is lying very ill somewhere," she said.

M. Fournier shook his head. "No. I tried to believe that myself at first; but I never did believe it, and I thought and thought and thought--Tenez, look!" He drew a piece of blank paper from one pocket, a pencil from another. The paper he spread upon his knee, the pencil he took between his teeth; then he held out his wrists.

"Now fasten them together."

Miranda uttered a cry. Her face grew very white. "What with?" she asked.

"Your belt."

She unclasped her belt from her waist and strapped Fournier's wrists together.

"Tighter," said he, "tighter. Now see!"

With great difficulty and labour he copied out Warriner's message on the blank paper; and while he wrote Miranda saw the sentence wavering up and down, the small letters coming out clear and small, the long strokes and tails straggling. She seized the copy almost before he had finished, and held it side by side with the original. There was a difference, of course, the difference which stamped one man's hand as Warriner's and the other as Fournier's, the difference of fear, but that was the only difference. The method in each case was identical; the same difficulties had produced the same results.

"There can be no doubt, hein?" asked Fournier, as Miranda unfastened the belt.

"How did this come to you?" she returned.

"I tell you," said he, "from the beginning. Bentham--that is what M. Warriner calls himself now, Bentham--Jeremy Bentham he calls himself, because he says he's such an economist--well, he and I are partners in a little business, and we have prospered. So when Bentham came back from Bemin Sooar to Tangier a week ago, I give a dinner in my house to a few friends and we dance afterwards. Perhaps ten or eleven of us and Bentham. Bentham he came and danced and he was the last to go away. He did not stay in my house--it was better for our little business that we should not be thought more than mere friends. He had a lodging in the town, while my house was outside up the hill. He rode away alone on a mule, for he was in evening dress and one cannot walk across the Sôk in dancing shoes, and he never reached his lodging. He disappeared. I heard no word of him, until yesterday; yesterday about mid-day, an Arab brought that scrap of paper to my shop."

"But the Arab told you how and where he got it?" said Miranda.

"Yes. He belonged to a douar, a tent village, you understand. The village is three days from Tangier on the road to Mequinez. The Arab was leading down his goats to the water a week ago, in the morning, when six men passed him at a distance. They were going up into the country; they had a mule with them. He watched them pass and noticed that one of them would now and then loiter and fall a little behind, whereupon the rest beat him with sticks and drove him again in front. And he did not resist, Madame, I am afraid we know why he did not resist."

Miranda pressed her hands to her forehead.

"Well," she said with an effort, and her voice had sunk to a whisper, "finish, finish!"

"It seemed to the Arab," continued Fournier, whose anxiety seemed in some measure to diminish, and whose face grew hopeful as he watched Miranda's increasing distress, "that this victim made a sign to him, and when the party had gone by he noticed something white gleaming on the brown soil in the line of their march. He went forward and picked it up. It was this piece of paper. He read the writing on it, these marks." M. Fournier turned over the sheet, and pointed to the indecipherable Arabic. "They mean, 'Take this to Fournier at Tangier and you will get money.' He opened it, he could not read the inside, but seeing that it was written in one of the languages of the Nazarenes, he thought there might be some truth in the promise. So he brought the paper to Tangier yesterday and I have brought it to you."

M. Fournier settled his glasses upon his nose and leaned forward for his answer. Miranda sat with knitted brows, gazing out to the dark mountains. Fournier would not interrupt her; he fancied she was searching her wits for a device to bring help to Warriner; but, indeed, she was not thinking at all.

Miranda had a trick of seeing pictures. She was not given to arguments and inferences; but a word, a sentence, would strike upon her hearing, and at once a curtain was rolled up somewhere in her mind, and she saw men moving to and fro and things happening as upon a lighted stage. Such pictures made up her arguments, her conclusions, even her motives; and it was because of their instant vividness that she was so rapidly moved to sympathy and dislike. So now there was set before her eyes the picture of a man riding down the hill of Tangier at night in the civilisation of evening dress, and, as she looked, it melted into another in which the same man, clad in vile rags, with his hands bound, was flogged forwards under a burning sun into the barbaric inlands of Morocco. She saw that brutal party, the five gaolers, the one captive, straggle past the tent village. She guessed at Ralph's despairing glance as though it was directed towards herself, she saw the scrap of paper flutter white upon the dark soil. And as she contemplated this vision, she heard M. Fournier speaking again to her; but the sound of his voice had changed. He was no longer telling his story; he was pleading with a tenderness which had something grotesquely pathetic, when she considered who it was for whom he pleaded. His foreign accent became more pronounced, and the voluble words tumbled one over the other.

"So M. Warriner does not ask you for money; that sees itself, is it not? Nor even does he ask you for help. Be sure of that, Madame; read the note again. He would not come to you for help; he is not so mean; he has too much pride;" and as Mrs. Warriner smiled, with perhaps a little bitterness, M. Fournier, noticing her smile, became yet more astonishing and intricate in his apologies. "He take your money, oh yes, I know very well, while he is with you; but then you get his company in exchange. That make you both quits, eh? But once he has gone away, he would not come back to you for money or help at all. He has so much pride. Oh no! He just take it from the first person he meet, me or anyone else. He has so much pride; besides, it would be simpler. No! It is I who come to you. He often speak to me of you--oh, but in the highest terms! And I say to myself: That dear Ralph, he is difficult to live with. He is not a comfortable friend. We know that, Mrs. Warriner and I, but we both love him very much--"

"No!"

The emphatic interruption fairly startled M. Fournier. Miranda had risen from her seat and stood over him. He would not have believed that so gentle a face could have taken on so vigorous an expression. He stammered a protest. Miranda repeated her denial: "No, no, no!" she cried. "Let us be frank!"

She turned aside from him, and leaning her elbows upon the crumbling parapet of the wall, looked across the valley and down the cliff's side where one road was cut in steep zigzags, and winding down to the plain as to the water's edge, helped to complete the illusion that the sea should fitly be breaking at the base.

M. Fournier's hopes dwindled in the face of this uncompromising denial. He had come to enlist her help; he had counted upon her affections, and had boldly counted, because Warriner had so surely attracted his own. M. Fournier would have been at a loss to explain his friendship for Warriner, to account for the causes or the qualities which evoked it, but he felt its strength, and he now knew that Mrs. Warriner had no lot or share in it.

He was therefore the more surprised when she turned back to him with eyes which were shining and moist, and said very gently: "But of course I will help." Her conduct was not at all inconsistent, however much it might appear so to M. Fournier. She was acting upon the same motive which had induced her, the moment she was aware of Ralph Warriner's existence, to return to Ronda, the one spot where Warriner would be sure to look for her if he needed her, and which had subsequently persuaded her to submit to the blackmail of Major Wilbraham. "Of course I will help. What can I do?"

M. Fournier's eyes narrowed, his manner became wary and cunning. "I hoped that you might perhaps hit upon some plan," he suggested.

"I?" Miranda thought for a moment, then she said: "We must appeal to the English Minister at Tangier."

M. Fournier sprang out of his chair. "No, that is the very last thing we must do. For what should we say? That Mr. Ralph Warriner, who was thought to be dead, has just been kidnapped in Morocco?"

"No, but that Mr. Bentham has," she returned quickly.

M. Fournier shrugged his shoulders. "Why am I here?" he exclaimed, stamping his foot. "I ask you, why am I here? Saperlipopette! Would I have come to you if any so simple remedy had been possible? Suppose we go politely to the English Minister and ask him to find Mr. Jeremy Bentham! The Minister goes to the Sultan of Morocco, and after many months, perhaps Mr. Bentham is found, perhaps he is not. Suppose that he is found and brought down to Tangier,--what next, I beg you? There will be talk about Mr. Bentham, there will be gentlemen everywhere, behind bushes, under tables, everywhere, so that the great British public may know the colours of the ties he wears, and at last be happy. His name will be in the papers, and more, Mrs. Warriner, his portrait too. His portrait; have you thought of that?"

"But he might escape the photographers."

"Suppose he do, by a miracle. Do you think there will be no inquiry as to what is Mr. Bentham's business in Morocco? Do you think the English Minister will not ask the inconvenient question? Do you think that you can hide his business, once an inquiry is set on foot, in that country? He might pass as a tourist, you think perhaps, hein? And any one man has only got to give a few dollars to some officer in the custom-house, and he will know that Mr. Bentham is smuggling guns into Morocco, and selling them to the Berbers of Bemin Sooar. What then? He would be taken for trial to Gibraltar, where only two years ago he was Captain Warriner."

Miranda had already heard enough from Wilbraham to confirm M. Fournier's statement about the custom-house.

"No," continued Fournier, "the risk is too great. And I call it risk!" He hunched his shoulders and spread out his hand. "It is a red-hot cert, as he would say. His identity would be established, and he had better, after all, be a captive in Morocco than a convict in England. There is some chance of an escape in Morocco."

"There is also in Morocco some chance of a--" Miranda's lips refused to speak the word. M. Fournier supplied it.

"Murder? I do not fear that. Had they intended murder, they would have killed that night, then and there, in the Sôk of Tangier. There would have been no letter dropped three days inland."

Miranda eagerly welcomed the argument. "Yes, yes," she exclaimed, and the colour came back to her lips. "He is held for ransom then, surely?"

M. Fournier shook his head. "Hardly. Had they captured him for ransom, they would have got from him the names of his friends. They would have used measures," said he, with some emphasis upon the word, at which Miranda shivered; "sure measures to get the names, and Warriner would have given mine. They would have come to me for the ransom, and I should have given it--if it was everything I had--and Warriner would be safe by now."

Fournier was aware that Miranda looked curiously and even with a sort of compunction towards him, though he did not understand the reason of her look. To him it was the most natural, simple thing in the world that he should care for Warriner.

"No, it is not ransom," and he threw a cautious glance this way and that, and then, even in that secret spot, continued in a whisper: "Warriner has enemies, enemies of his own race. I do not wonder at it," he explained impartially. "He treats me, yes, even me, who am his one friend, as though--well, his own phrase is the best. He wipes the floor with me. He has promised to do it many times, and many times he has done it too. No doubt he has enemies, and they have arranged his capture."

"Why?"

"Suppose they sell him for a slave, a long way off and a long way inland. It would not be pleasant at all, and most of all unpleasant to him, for he is particular. Of course you know that, Mrs. Warriner. He likes his linen very clean and fine. He would not enjoy being a slave, yet he could not appeal to his Government, even if he got the chance."

"Oh, don't, please!" cried Miranda. That intimate detail about Ralph's habits brought home to her most convincingly his present plight. "But what enemies?" she asked in a moment or two. "Is it a guess of yours, or do you know of any?"

M. Fournier hitched his chair nearer. His voice became yet more confidential.

"Three months ago an Englishman came to my shop."

"Three months ago?" interrupted Miranda. "He leaned over your counter and he said, 'How did you work that little affair on Rosevear, and how's my dear friend, Ralph Warriner?'"

"Ah, you know him!" cried Fournier, springing up in excitement.

"Yes, and he has nothing to do with Ralph's capture," replied Miranda. "He only went that one time to Tangier." M. Fournier resumed his seat, and she briefly explained to the Belgian the reason and the consequence of Wilbraham's visit. Fournier's face fell as he listened. He had hoped that the necessary clue had been discovered, and when Miranda finished he sat silent in a glum despair. After a little his face lightened.

"Only once you say he came to Tangier, this man you speak of--only once?" he asked eagerly, stretching out his hand.

"Only the once."

"He was not there earlier in the year? He was not there in May? Think carefully. Be very sure!"

Mrs. Warriner reflected for a second. "I am sure he was not," she replied. "He travelled by train from Monte Carlo to Marseilles in May. From Marseilles he came directly by boat to England."

"Good," said M. Fournier. He sat forward in his chair and rubbed the palms of his hands together. "Now listen! There was another Englishman who came in May. He came to my shop, though the shutter was on the window and the shop closed."

"Who was he?" asked Mrs. Warriner.

"I cannot guess."

"Tell me what he was like."

"Ah! there's the trouble. Neither of us saw him. Warriner heard his voice, that is all. And a voice? There is no clue more deceptive. The one thing Warriner is sure of is that he had never heard the voice before."

"But what was it that he heard?"

"I tell you. Warriner came down to Tangier that very morning from the country. He travelled as always in the dress of a Moor, for he speaks their tongues, no Moor better, and our little business, you understand, needs secrecy. I closed my shop, shuttered the window, locked the door. Warriner told me he had arranged with the sheikhs of the Berber tribes to deliver so many Winchesters, so much ammunition, within a certain period. The period was short; Warriner's boat, the Ten Brothers, was waiting at Tarifa. I leave him to change his dress and shave his beard, while I go down to the harbour and hire a felucca to put him over to Tarifa. But Warriner forgot to lock the door behind me. In a minute or two he hear a hand scrape softly, oh so softly, up the door towards the latch. For a second he stood, with the razor in his hand like this," and the Belgian, in the absorption of his narrative began to act the scene, "looking at the latch, waiting for it to rise, and listening. Then he remembered that he had not locked the door. He crept on tip-toe towards it; just as he reached it he heard a loud English voice shout to him violently, 'Look out!' That phrase is a menace, eh?" he stopped to ask.

"It might be. It would more naturally be a warning," said Mrs. Warriner.

"In either case it means an enemy. As he shouted Warriner's hand was already on the key. Warriner turn the lock, and immediately the Englishman batter and knock at the door, but he could not get in, and after a little he went away. Ah! how often we have wondered who that man was, and why he shouted out his threat and tried to force the door. To know that you have one enemy at your heels, but you cannot pick him out because you have not seen his face! That frightens me, Madame Warriner. I am a coward, and it is no wonder that it frightens me." The perspiration broke out on Fournier's forehead as he made his frank confession. "But it frightens Warriner too, who is no coward. Often and often have I seen him lift up a finger, so," he suited the action to the word, "when a new voice speak within his hearing, and listen, listen, listen, to make sure whether that was the voice which shouted through the door or no. But a voice! You cannot be certain you recognise it, unless you can recognise also the face of the man to whom it belongs. A singer's voice, yes! Perhaps you might know that again though you heard it for the first time blindfold. But a voice that merely speaks or shouts, no!"

M. Fournier picked up his hat and rose from his chair. Miranda rose too, and they stood face to face with one another under the awning.

"So I ask you this. Will you help to recover your husband?" he asked, with a simplicity of appeal which went home to Miranda all the more, because it did not presume to claim her help. "Either a search must be made privately through Morocco until he is found and bought, and such a search seems hopeless; or the unknown man who shouted through the door must be discovered. That is the simplest way. For this I do believe"--and he expressed his belief with a great solemnity and conviction which sank very memorably into Miranda's mind--"I believe that if we lay our hands upon that man we shall lay our hands also upon the means to rescue Warriner from his servitude."

"But how can I help? I do not know the man who shouted through the door." The words were flung at Fournier in a passion of impotence. "You say you need no money. I cannot scour Morocco. How can a woman help?"

M. Fournier hesitated. He took off his glasses. He found it easier to speak the matter of his thoughts when he saw her face dimly, and could not take note of its expressions.

"A woman very often has friends," he hinted.

He saw her face grow rosy and then pale.

"Yes, but I have lost the glove," she cried impulsively, and as she turned towards the perplexed M. Fournier, the blood rushed back into her cheeks. "I mean," she stammered, and broke off suddenly into a question which was at once an accusation and a challenge.

"And men, have they no friends?"

Fournier did not affect to misunderstand her.

"Here and there, perhaps a man has one friend who will deliberately risk much, even life, for him, but in those cases he has only one such friend. Warriner has one, but alas! that one friend is myself. Already, it is true, I have risked my life for him at the Scillies, and I would gladly lose it for him now, if I could only lose it without foreknowledge. But what can I do? A little fat Belgian bourgeois, of middle age, who speaks no language correctly but his own, and has only a few poor words of Arabic, a man of no strength, and, Madame, a coward,--what could I do inland in Morocco?" He made no parade of humility as he described himself; he used the simple, straightforward tone of one who advances cogent arguments. Miranda was moved by an impulse to hold out her hand to him.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

M. Fournier was encouraged to continue his plea.

"But to possess sufficient friends so that one may choose the adequate instrument,--ah, that is the privilege of women!" He added timidly, "Of women who have youth and beauty," but in a voice so low that the words hardly reached Miranda's ears, and their significance was not understood by her at all.

"I have not many friends," she returned frankly, "but I have one who would be adequate. I cannot tell whether I can bring myself to--I mean I cannot tell whether he could go; he has duties. It is asking much to ask any man to set out into Morocco on such an errand. However, I must think of it; I could at all events send for him and tell him of my husband--"

M. Fournier interposed quickly: "He knows nothing of Ralph Warriner?"

"He believes my husband dead."

"Then why should he not continue to believe your husband dead?" asked Fournier, with a sly cunning. "It is Mr. Jeremy Bentham he goes out to find,--a friend of yours--a relation perhaps--is it not so? We can keep Ralph Warriner dead for a while longer."

The little man's intention was becoming obvious.

"Why?" asked Miranda, sharply.

"It would be more prudent."

"I don't understand."

Her voice was cold and dangerous.

"A man has one friend, a woman many," explained M. Fournier; "but there are compensations for the man in that his friend will serve him for friendship's sake. But a man will not serve a woman for friendship's sake. Not if he serve her well."

M. Fournier was prepared for an outburst of indignation; he was not prepared for the expression which came over Miranda's face, and he could not understand it. She looked at him fixedly and, as it seemed, in consternation. "That is not true," she said; "it is not true. Surely, surely it cannot be true."

M. Fournier made no answer. She turned away from him and walked along the flagged pathway, turned at the end and came slowly back. "A man will only serve a woman if he cares for her?"

M. Fournier bowed.

"And men can be made to care?"

M. Fournier smiled.

"But it needs time?"

M. Fournier shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"And it needs tricks?"

M. Fournier made a pun.

"Nature, Madame, has put the tricks in your hand."

Miranda nodded her head once or twice, and made a remark which M. Fournier was at a loss to apply. "The old question," said she, "and the old answer;" and at once an irrational anger flamed up within her, anger with M. Fournier for posing the question again, anger with herself for her perplexity, anger even against Charnock, because he did not magically appear in the garden and answer the question and dissolve her perplexity. But M. Fournier alone was in the garden with her, and the full force of her anger broke upon him. "I am to throw out my net," she cried, "and catch my friend! I am to trick him, to lie to him, and to earn with the lie the use of his life and his brains and his time and his manhood. How dare you come to me with such a thought? A coward's thought indeed!"

"The thought of a man who loves his friend," said M. Fournier, stubbornly; and he continued without any sarcasm: "Your sentiments, Madame Warriner, are most correct; they do you honour, but I love my friend."

To his surprise Miranda suddenly smiled at him, and then laughed. "I was never treated with such absolute disregard in all my life," she said. "No, don't apologise, I like you for it."

"Then you will do as I propose?" he exclaimed.

Miranda grew serious. "I cannot. If I ask my friend to go upon this errand, he must know before he goes who it is I ask him to bring back. I must think what can be done. You will go back to Tangier; perhaps you may find Ralph there when you return. I will write to you at Tangier."

M. Fournier had plainly no opinion of her plan; but he saw that he could not dissuade her. He took the hand which she held out to him, and returned sorrowfully through the patio to the street.

CHAPTER XI

[IN WHICH MIRANDA ADOPTS A NEW LINE OF CONDUCT AND THE MAJOR EXPRESSES SOME DISCONTENT]

Miranda was left with two convictions, of which she was very certain. Somehow, somewhither, help must be sent to Ralph; and if Charnock carried the help, he must know why and for whom before he went.

She stood in the patio until the outer door closed behind M. Fournier. A local newspaper lying upon a wicker chair caught her eye, and harassed and unresolved as she was, she turned eagerly for rest to its commonplaces. She read an anecdote about an unknown politician, and a summary of Don Carlos's prospects, with extreme care and concentration; for she knew that her perplexities lay in wait for her behind the screen of the news sheet, and she was very tired.

She turned over the sheet, and in spite of herself, began to feel at a third idea. She applied herself consequently to the first paragraph which met her eye, and read it over with great speed, perhaps ten times. But the words she read were not the printed words. They were these:--

"Send me the glove, and when I come up to Ronda, it will be understood without a word why I have come. There will be no need for me to speak at all, and you will only have to tell me the particular thing that wants doing."

And the idea became distinct. She could choose her own time for telling Charnock the particular thing which wanted doing. He would ask no questions; he had indeed hit upon that device of the glove to spare her; she could send the glove, and she could tell him after he had come in answer, but at her own discretion, why she had sent it. Therefore she had time--she had time.

She turned to her paragraph again, read it with comprehension, and from the paragraph her trouble sprang at her and caught her by the heart. For what she read was the account of the opening of the branch line to Algeciras. Charnock's work was done, then; he would be leaving Algeciras. Even at that moment her first feeling was one of approaching loneliness, so closely had the man crept into her thoughts. She took a step towards her parlour, stopped, stood for a moment irresolute, ran up the winding iron staircase to the landing half-way up the patio, and fetched a new long white kid glove from her dressing-room. She moulded it upon her hand, soiled it by a ten minutes' wearing, ripped it across the palm, and sealed it up in an envelope.

Jane Holt came into the patio while Miranda was still writing the address.

"What's that?" she asked.

"A sham, Jane, a sham," said Miranda, in a queer, unsteady voice; "a trick, the first of them."

Jane Holt shook her head. "You are very strange, Miranda," but Miranda picked up the envelope, and putting on her hat hurried to the post-office. As she crossed the bridge over the Tajo a man barred her way. She tried to pass him; he moved again in front of her, and she saw that the man was Wilbraham.

"I wish to speak to you."

"In ten minutes," said she, "in the Alameda. I have a letter to post."

"The letter can wait," said he.

"If it did, it would never be posted," said she, and she hurried past him.

The Major followed her with inquisitive eyes; he felt a certain admiration for her buoyant walk, her tall slight figure, which a white muslin dress with a touch of colour at the waist so well set off, and for the pose of her head under the wide straw hat. But business instincts prevailed over his admiration. He lit a cigarette.

"What is the large sealed letter which must be posted at once, or it will never be posted at all?" he asked himself. "Why must it be posted at once?"

He strolled to the Alameda unable to find an answer. In the Alameda, at the bench before the railings, Miranda was waiting for him. She rose at once to meet him.

"Why have you come?" she asked. "It is not quarter-day. We made our bargain. I have kept my part of it."

"Yes," said he. "But it was not a good bargain for me. I underrated my necessities. I overrated my taste for a quiet life."

"And the Horace?" she asked scornfully. "One of the few things worth doing, was it not?"

Wilbraham flushed angrily.

"So it is," he said. "But I find it difficult to settle down. I need, in fact,--do we not all need them?--intervals of relaxation." He spoke uneasily; he looked even more worn and tired than when he first came to Ronda. Miranda understood that here indeed was the real tragedy of the man's life.

"All these years, fifteen years," she said, "you have dreamed of doing sooner or later this one thing. You have played with the dream. You have kept your self-respect by means of it. It has set you apart from your companions. And now, when the opportunity comes, you find that you were only after all on the level of your companions, lower, perhaps a trifle lower, by this trifle of delusion. For you cannot do the work."

Wilbraham did not resent the speech, which was uttered without reproach or accusation, but in the tone of one who notes a fact which should have been foreseen.

"A topping fellow Horace, of course," Wilbraham began.

"And I trusted you to do it," she said suddenly, and looked at him for a moment full in the face, not angrily, but with a queer sort of interest in the mistake she had made. Then she turned from him and walked away.

The Major followed quickly, but before he could come up with her she turned round on him.

"Follow me for one other step," she said, "and I call that guardia twenty yards away."

She meant to do it, too; this was unmistakable. She resumed her walk, and the Major thought it prudent to remain where he was. He remained in fact for some time on that spot, whistling softly to himself. Wilbraham's menaces had sunk to a complete insignificance in Miranda's mind, since she had been confronted with the actual positive disaster which had befallen Ralph Warriner. Wilbraham, however, was not in a position to trace Miranda's sudden audacity to its true source. He fell therefore, and not unnaturally, into the error of imagining that she drew her courage to refuse his demands from some new and external support. His thoughts went back to the letter which must be posted at once. Had that letter anything to do with that support? Had it anything to do with her refusal?

Wilbraham asked himself these questions with considerable uneasiness, for after all the seven hundred per annum was not so absolutely assured. He came to the conclusion that it would be wise to transfer his quarters from Tarifa to Ronda.

CHAPTER XII

[THE HERO, LIKE ALL HEROES, FINDS HIMSELF IN A FOG]

At eight o'clock the next morning Charnock was crushing the remainder of his clothes into a portmanteau. A couple of corded trunks stood ready for the porters, while the manager of the line sat in the window overlooking Algeciras Bay, and gave him gratuitous advice as to totally different and very superior methods of packing.

The manager suddenly rose to his feet.

"Here's the P. and O. coming into the bay," he said. "Man, but you have very little time. I'm thinking you'll miss it."

Charnock raised a flushed face from his portmanteau, and so wasted a few seconds. He made no effort to catch them up.

"I'm thinking, too, you would not be very sorry to miss it," continued the manager, sagely. "Though what charms you can discover in Algeciras, it's beyond my powers to comprehend."

Charnock did not controvert or explain the manager's supposition. He continued to pack, but perhaps a trifle more slowly than before.

"You have got my address, Macdonald?" he said. "You won't lose it, will you?"

He shut up the portmanteau and knelt upon it.

"You will forward everything that comes--everything without fail?" he insisted.

"In all human probability," returned Macdonald, "I will forward nothing at all. For I am thinking you will lose the boat."

There was a knock on the door; Charnock's servant brought in a letter. The letter lay upon its face, and the sealed back of the envelope had an official look.

"Open it, will you, Macdonald?" said Charnock, as he fastened the straps. "Well, what's it about?"

"I cannot tell. It's written in a dialect I do not understand," said the manager, gravely, and Charnock, turning about, saw that he dangled and deliberated upon a long white kid glove.

Charnock jumped up and snatched it away.

"It's a female's," said the manager, sagely.

"It's a woman's," returned Charnock, with indignation.

"You are very young," observed Macdonald. "And I'll point out to you that you have torn your letter."

Charnock was turning the glove over, and showed the palm at that moment. He smiled, but made no answer. He folded the glove, wrapped it in its envelope, took it out again, and smoothed its creases. Then he folded it once more, held it for a little balanced on his hand, and finally replaced it in the envelope and hid the envelope in his pocket.

"Man, but you are very young," remarked Macdonald, "and I'm thinking that you'll lose--"

"There's a train to Ronda pretty soon?" interrupted Charnock.

"There is," replied Macdonald, drily, "and I'll be particular to mind your address, and forward everything that comes. Eh, but you have paid your passage on the P. and O."

Charnock, in spite of that argument, took his seat in the train for Ronda, and travelled up through the forest of cork trees whose foliage split the sunshine, making here a shade, there an alley of light. The foresters were at work stripping the trunks of their bark, and Charnock was in a mood to make parables of the world, so long as they fitted in with and exemplified his own particular purposes and plans. He himself was a forester, and the rough bark he was stripping was Miranda's distress, so it is to be supposed that the bare tree-trunk was Miranda herself; and, to be sure, what simile could be more elegant?

Charnock's dominant feeling, indeed, was one of elation. The message of his mirror was being fulfilled. He had the glove in his pocket to assure him of that, and the feel of the glove, of its delicate kid between his strong fingers, pleased him beyond measure. For it seemed appropriate and expressive of her, and he hoped that the strength of his fingers was expressive of himself. But beyond that, it was a call, a challenge to his chivalry, which up till now, through all his years, had never once been called upon and challenged; and therein lay the true cause of his elation.

The train swept out of the cork forest, and the great grass slopes stretched upwards at the side of the track, dotted with white villages, seamed with rocks. Charnock fell to marvelling at the apt moment of the summons. Just when his work was done, when his mind and his body were free, the glove had come to him. If it had come by a later post on that same day, he would have been on his way to England. But it had not; it had come confederate with the hour of its coming.

The train passed into the gorge of tunnels, climbing towards Ronda. He was not forgetful that he was summoned to help Miranda out of a danger perhaps, certainly out of a great misfortune. But he had never had a doubt that the misfortune from some quarter, and at some time, would fall. She had allowed him on the balcony in St. James's Park to understand that she herself expected it. He knew, too, that it must be some quite unusual misfortune. For had she not herself said, with a complete comprehension of what she said, "If I have troubles I must fight them through myself"? He had been prepared then for the troubles, and he was rejoiced that after all they were of a kind wherein his service could be of use.

At the head of the gorge he caught his first view of Ronda, balanced aloft upon its dark pinnacle of rock. It was mid-day, and the sun tinged with gold the white Spanish houses and the old brown mansions of the Moors; and over all was a blue arch of sky, brilliant and cloudless. At that distance and in that clear light, Ronda seemed one piece of ivory, exquisitely carved and tinted, and then exquisitely mounted on a black pedestal. Charnock was not troubled with any of Lady Donnisthorpe's perplexities as to why Miranda persisted in making that town her home. To him it seemed the only place where she could live, since it alone could fitly enshrine her.

The train wound up the incline at the back of the town and steamed into the station. Charnock drove thence to the hotel in the square near the bull-ring, lunched, and asked his way to Mrs. Warriner's house. He stood for a while looking at the blank yellow wall which gave on to the street, and the heavy door of walnut wood.

For the first time he began to ponder what was the nature of the peril in which Miranda stood. His speculations were of no particular value, but the fact that he speculated at this spot, opposite the house, opposite the door, was. For, quite unconsciously, his eyes took an impression of the geometrical arrangement of the copper nails with which it was encrusted, or rather sought to take such an impression. For the geometrical figures were so intricate in their involutions that the eyes were continually baffled and continually provoked. Charnock was thus absently searching for the key to their inter-twistings when he walked across the road and knocked. He was conducted through the patio. He was shown into the small dark-panelled parlour which overlooked the valley. The door was closed upon him; the room was empty. A book lay open upon the table before the window. Charnock stood in front of this table looking out of the window across to the sierras; so that the book was just beneath his nose. He had but to drop his eyes and he would have read the title, and known the subject-matter, of the book, and perhaps taken note or some pencil lines scored in the margin against a passage here and there, for the book had been much in Miranda's hands these last few days. But he did not, for he heard a light step cross the patio outside and pause on the threshold of the door.

Charnock turned expectantly away from the table. The door, however, did not open, nor on the other hand were the footsteps heard to retreat. A woman then was standing, quite silent and quite motionless, on the other side of that shut door; and that woman, no doubt, was Miranda. Charnock was puzzled; he, too, stood silent and motionless, looking towards the door and wondering why she paused there and in what attitude she stood. For the seconds passed, and there must have been a lapse of quite two minutes between the moment when the footsteps ceased and the moment when the door was flung open.

For the door was flung open, noisily, violently, and with a great bustle of petticoats an unknown woman danced into the room humming a tune. She stopped with all the signs of amazement when she saw Charnock. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "why didn't they tell me?" She cast backwards over her shoulder that glance of the startled fawn which befits a solitary maid in the presence of a devouring man. Then she advanced timidly, lowered her eyes, and said: "So you have come to Ronda, then?"

This unknown woman had paused outside the door, yet she had swung into the room as though in a great hurry, and had been much surprised to see her visitor. Charnock was perplexed. Moreover, the unknown woman wore the semblance of Miranda. She was dressed in a white frock very elaborate with lace, he noticed; there was a shimmer of satin at her throat and waist, and to him who had not seen her for these months past, and who had thought of her as of one draped in black,--since thus only he had seen her,--she gleamed against the dark panels of the room, silvered and wonderful.

"So you have come to Ronda?" said she.

"Of course."

She held out her hand with a gingerly manner of timidity, and pressed his fingers when they touched hers, as though she could not help herself, and then hastily drew her hand away, as if she was ashamed and alarmed at her forwardness. Charnock could not but remember a frank, honest hand-clasp, with which she had bidden him goodbye in London.

"Is this your first visit to Ronda?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Sure?" She looked at him with her eyebrows raised and an arch glance of provocation. "Sure you have not come up once or twice just to see in what corner of the world I lived?"

"No; I have been busy."

Miranda shrugged her shoulders.

"I had no right to expect you would." She pushed out a foot in a polished shoe beyond the hem of her dress, contemplated it with great interest, and suddenly withdrew it with much circumstance of modesty. Then with an involuntary gesture of repugnance which Charnock did not understand, she went over to the window and stood looking out from it. From that position too she spoke.

"You promised that night, if you have not forgotten, at Lady Donnisthorpe's, on the balcony, to tell me about yourself, about those years you spent in Westminster." And Charnock broke in upon her speech in a voice of relief.

"I understand," said he.

"What?"

"You," he replied simply.

"Oh, I hope not," she returned; "for when a woman becomes intelligible to a man, he loses all--liking for her," and she spoke the word "liking" with extreme shyness as though there were a bolder word with which he might replace it if he chose. "Is not that the creed?"

"A false creed," said he, and her eyes fell upon the open book. She uttered a startled exclamation, threw a quick glance at Charnock, closed the book and covered it with a newspaper.

"Let us go into the garden," said she; "and you shall talk to me of those years in which I am most interested."

"That I can understand," said he, and she glanced at him sharply, suspiciously, but there was no sarcasm in his accent. He had hit upon an explanation of the change in her. She stood in peril, she needed help, and very likely help of a kind which implied resource, which involved danger. She knew nothing of him, nothing of his capacity. It was no more than natural that he should require to know and that she should sound his years for the knowledge, before she laid him under the obligation of doing her a service.

He sat down on the chair in which M. Fournier had sat only yesterday.

"It will sound very unfamiliar to you," he said with a laugh. "My father was vicar of a moorland parish on the hills above Brighouse in Yorkshire. There I lived until I was twelve, until my father died. He had nothing but the living, which was poor--the village schoolmaster, what with capitation grants, was a good deal better off--so that when he died, he died penniless. I was adopted by a maiden aunt who took me to her home, a little villa in the south suburbs of London of which the shutters had never been taken down from the front windows since she had come to live there three years before."

"Why?" asked Miranda, in surprise.

"She was eccentric," explained Charnock, with a smile, and he resumed. "Nor had the front door ever been opened. My aunt was afraid that visitors might call, and, as she truly said, the house was not yet in order. The furniture, partly unpacked, with wisps of straw about the legs of the chairs, was piled up in the uncarpeted rooms. For there was only a carpet down in one room, the room in which we lived, and since the room was in the front and the shutters were up, we lived in a perpetual twilight."

"But did the servants do nothing?" exclaimed Miranda.

"There were no servants," returned Charnock. "My aunt said that they hampered her independence. Consequently of course we made our meals of tinned meat and bottled stout, which we ate standing up by the kitchen table in the garden if it was fine. But wet or fine the kitchen table always stood in the garden."

Here Miranda began to laugh and Charnock joined with her.

"It was a quaint sort of life," said he, "but rather ghostly to a boy of twelve."

"But you went to school?"

"No, my schooldays were over. I just lived in the twilight of that house, and through the chinks of the shutters watched people passing in the street, and lay awake at night listening to the creak of the bare boards. The house was in a terrace, and since we went to bed as soon as it grew dark to save the gas, I could hear through the wall the sounds of people laughing and talking, sometimes too the voices of boys of my own age playing while I lay in bed. I used to like the noise at times; it was companionable and told me fairy stories of blazing firesides. At times, however, I hated it beyond words, and hated the boys who laughed and shouted while I lay in the dark amongst the ghostly piles of furniture."

Miranda was now quite serious, and Charnock, as he watched her, recognised in the woman who was listening, the woman he had talked with on the balcony over St. James's Park, and not the woman he had talked with five minutes since.

"Only to think of it," she exclaimed. "I was living then amongst the Suffolk meadows, and the great whispering elms of the Park, and I never knew." She spoke almost in a tone of self-reproach as she clasped her hands together on her knees. "I never knew!"

"Oh, but we had our dissipations," returned Charnock. "We dug potatoes in the garden, and sometimes we paid a visit to Marshall and Snelgrove."

"Marshall and Snelgrove!"

"Yes, those were gala days. My aunt would buy the best ready-made bodice in the shop, which she carried away with her. From Marshall and Snelgrove's we used to go to Verrey's restaurant, where we dined amongst mirrors and much gilding, and about nine o'clock we would travel back to our suburb, creep into the dark house by the back door, and go to bed without a light. Imagine that if you can, Mrs. Warriner. The clatter, the noise, the flowers, the lights, of the restaurant, men and women in evening dress, and just about the time when they were driving up to their theatres, these people, in whose company we had dined, we were creeping into the dark, close-shuttered villa of the bare boards, and groping our way through the passage without a light. I used to imagine that every room had a man hiding behind the door, and all night long I heard men in my room breathing stealthily. It was after one such night that I ran away."

"You ran away?"

"Yes, and hid myself in London. I picked up a living one way and another. It doesn't cost much to live when you are put to it. I sold newspapers. I ran errands--"

"You didn't carry a sandwich-board?" exclaimed Miranda, eagerly. "Say you didn't do that!"

"I didn't," replied Charnock, with some surprise at her eagerness. "They wouldn't have given a nipper like me a sandwich-board," and Miranda drew an unaccountable breath of relief. "Finally I became an office boy, and I was allowed by my employer to sleep in an empty house in one of the small streets at the back of Westminster Abbey. There weren't any carpets either in that house, but I was independent, you see, and I saved my lodging. I wasn't unhappy during those three years. I understood that very well, when I heard the big clock strike twelve again on Lady Donnisthorpe's balcony. It was the first time I had heard it since I lived in the empty house, and heard it every night, and the sound of it was very pleasant and friendly."

"Then you left London," said Miranda.

"After three years. I was a clerk then; I was seventeen, and I had ambitions which clerking didn't satisfy. I always had a hankering after machinery, and I used to teach myself drawing. The lessons, however, did not turn out very successful, when I put them to the test."

"What did you do?" asked Miranda.

"I went up North to Leeds. There's a firm of railway contractors and manufacturers of locomotives. Sir John Martin is the head partner, and I had seen him once or twice at my father's house, for he took and takes a great interest in the Yorkshire clergy."

"I see. You went to him and told him who you were," said Miranda, who inclined towards Charnock more and more from the interest which she took in a youth so entirely strange, and apart from her own up-bringing, just as he on his part had been from the first attracted to her by the secure traditional life of which she was the flower, of which he traced associations in her simplicity, and up to this day, at all events, her lack of affectations.

"No," replied Charnock, "it would have been wiser if I had done that; but I didn't. I changed my name, and applied for a vacancy as draughtsman. I obtained it, and held the post for three weeks. Why they suffered me for three weeks is still a mystery, for of course I couldn't draw at all. At the end of three weeks I was discharged. I asked to be taken on as anything at thirteen shillings a week. I saw Sir John Martin himself. He said I couldn't live on thirteen shillings; I said I could, and he asked me how." Charnock began to laugh at his own story. "I told him how," he said. "I lived practically for nothing."

"How?" said Miranda. "Quick, tell me!" Charnock laughed again. "I had been three weeks at the works, you see, where hands were continually changing. I lived in a sort of mechanics' boarding-house, and I lived practically for nothing, on condition that I kept the house full, which I was able to do, for I got on very well with the men at the works. Sir John laughed when I told him, and took me into the office. So there I was a clerk again, which I didn't want to be; however, I was not a clerk for long. One Sunday Sir John Martin came down to the boarding-house and asked for me. It was dinner time, and he was shown straight into the dining-room, where I was sitting, if you please, at the head of the table, in my shirtsleeves, carving for all I was worth. He leaned against the door and shook with laughter. 'You are certain to get on,' he said; 'but I would like a few minutes with you alone.' I put on my coat, and went out with him into the street. 'Is your name Charnock?' he asked, and I answered that it was. 'I thought I knew your face,' said he, 'and that's why I took you into my office, though I couldn't put a name to you. So if you are proud enough to think that I took you on your own merits, you are wrong. You might as well have told me your real name, and saved yourself some time. Look at that!' and he gave me a newspaper, and pointed out an advertisement. A firm of solicitors in London was advertising for me, and the firm, I happened to know, looked after my aunt's affairs. I went to London that night. My aunt had died sixteen months before, and had left me six hundred a year. The rest was easy. I took Sir John's advice. 'Railways,' he said, 'railways; they are the white man's tentacles;' and Sir John gave me my first employment as an engineer."

Miranda was silent for a long while after Charnock had ended his story. Charnock himself had nothing further to say. It was for her to speak, not for him to question. She had sent the glove. She knew why he had come. Miranda, however, took a turn along the flagged pathway, and leaned over the breast-high wall and pointed out a vulture above the valley, and talked in inattentive, undecided tones upon any impersonal topic. It was natural, Charnock thought, that she should wish to con over what he had told her. So he rose from his chair.

"Shall I come back to-morrow?" he asked, and she rallied herself to answer him.

"Will you?" she exclaimed. "I should be so glad," and checking the ardour of her words, she explained, "I mean of course if you have nothing better to do," and she examined a flower with intense absorption, and then looked at him pathetically over her shoulder, as he moved away. So again he lost sight of the Miranda of the balcony, and carried away his first impression, that he had met that afternoon with a stranger.

His fervour of the morning changed to a chilling perplexity. He wondered at the change in her. Something else, too, seized upon his thoughts, and exercised his fancies. Why had she stood so long outside the door before she hurried in with her simulated surprise? How had she looked as she paused there, silent and motionless? That question in particular haunted him, for he thought that if only he could have seen her through the closed door he would have found a clue which would lead him to comprehend and to justify her.

Absorbed by these thoughts he sat through dinner unobservant of his few neighbours at the long table. He was therefore surprised when, as he stood in the stone hall, lighting his cigar, a friendly hand was clapped down upon his shoulder, and an affable voice remarked:--

"Aha, dear friend! Finished the little job at Algeciras, I saw. What are you doing at Ronda?"

"What are you?" asked Charnock, as he faced the irrepressible Major Wilbraham.

"Trying to make seven hundred per annum into a thousand. You see I have no secrets. Now confidence for confidence, eh, dear friend?" and his eyes drew cunningly together behind the glowing end of his cigar.

"I am afraid that I must leave you to guess."

"Guessing's not very sociable work."

"Perhaps that's why I am given to it," said Charnock, and he walked between the stone columns and up the broad staircase.

The Major looked after him without the slightest resentment.

"Slipped up that time, Ambrose, my lad," he said to himself, and sauntered cheerfully out of the hotel.

Five minutes later Charnock passed through the square at a quick walk. Wilbraham was meditating a translation of the Carmen Sæculare, but business habits prevailed with him. He thrust the worn little Horace into his breast-pocket and followed Charnock at a safe distance. By means of a skill acquired by much practice, he walked very swiftly and yet retained the indifferent air of a loiterer. There was another picture of the tracker and the tracked to be seen that evening, but in Ronda instead of Tangier, and Charnock was unable to compare it with its companion picture, since, in this case, he was the tracked. The two men passed down the hill to the bridge. Charnock stopped for a little and stood looking over the parapet to the water two hundred and fifty feet below, which was just visible through the gathering darkness like a ridge of snow on black soil. Wilbraham halted at the end of the bridge. It seemed that Charnock was merely taking a stroll. He had himself, however, nothing better to do at the moment. He waited and repeated a stanza of his translation to the rhythm of the torrent, and was not displeased. Charnock moved on across the bridge, across the Plaza on the farther side of the bridge, up a street until he came to an old Moorish house that showed a blank yellow wall to the street and a heavy walnut door encrusted with copper nails.

Then he stopped again and looked steadily at the house and for a long while. Wilbraham began pensively to whistle a slow tune under his breath. Charnock walked on, stopped again, looked back to the house, as though he searched for a glimpse of the lights. But there was no chink or cranny in that blank wall. The house faced the street, blind, dark, and repellent.

Charnock suddenly retraced his steps. Wilbraham had just time to mount the doorsteps of a house as though he was about to knock, before Charnock passed him. Charnock had not noticed him. Wilbraham descended the steps and followed Charnock back into the Plaza.

Charnock was looking for a road which he had seen that afternoon from Miranda's garden, a road which wound in zigzags down the cliff. The road descended from the Plaza, Charnock discovered it, walked down it; behind him at a little distance walked Wilbraham. It was now falling dark, but the night was still, so that Wilbraham was compelled to drop yet farther and farther behind, lest the sound of his footsteps upon the hard, dry ground should betray his pursuit. He fell so far behind, in fact, that he ceased to hear Charnock's footsteps at all. He accordingly hurried; he did more than hurry, he ran; he turned an angle of the road and immediately a man seated upon the bank by the road-side said:--

"Buenas noches."

The man was Charnock.

Wilbraham had the presence of mind not to stop.

"Felices suenos," he returned in a gruff voice and continued to run. He ran on until another angle of the road hid him. Then he climbed on to the top of the bank, which was high, and with great caution doubled back along the ridge until Charnock was just beneath him.

Charnock was gazing upwards; Wilbraham followed his example, and saw that right above his head, on the rim of the precipice, an open window glowed upon the night, a square of warm yellow light empanelled in the purple gloom.

The ceiling of the room was visible, and just below the ceiling a gleam as of polished panels. At that height above them the window seemed very small; its brightness exaggerated the darkness which surrounded it; and both men looked into it as into a tiny theatre of marionettes and expected the performance of a miniature play.

All that they saw, however, was a shadow-pantomime thrown upon the ceiling, and that merely of a tantalising kind--the shadow of a woman's head and hair, growing and diminishing as the unseen woman moved away or to the candles. A second shadow, and this too the shadow of a woman, joined the first. But no woman showed herself at the window, and Charnock, tiring of the entertainment, returned to his hotel.

Miranda of the Balcony: A Story

MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY

MIRANDA

OF THE BALCONY

A STORY

BY

A. E. W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE BUCKLER," ETC.

New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANYLONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.1899

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1899,By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & SmithNorwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1899

Copyright, 1899,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.