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?"