"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.