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?"