"Yet you wrote the letter to me. You also sent the telegram. You sent me neither the one nor the other without good reason." And Pamela dropped her eyes again from his face.
"If Callon is not at Eze," he insisted, "he is close by!"
Pamela did not answer. She sat trying to compose her thoughts. Suppose that she refused to answer, Tony would go to Eze. He might find Millie and Callon there. On the other hand, it was unlikely that he would. Pamela had seen that quiet, solitary restaurant by the sea where Callon lodged. It was there that they would be, she had no doubt.
"Where is Callon?" asked Tony. "Where does he stay?"
Pamela closed her ears to the question, working still at the stern problem of her answer. If she refused to tell him what he asked, Millie and Callon might escape for to-night. That was possible. But, then, to-morrow would come. Tony must meet them to-morrow in any case, and to-morrow might be too late.
"I will tell you," she answered, and she described the place. And in another minute she was alone. She heard the front door close, she heard Tony's step upon the gravel of the garden path, and then all was silent. She sat holding her throbbing temples in her hands. Visions rose before her eyes, and her fear made them extraordinarily luminous and vivid. She saw that broad, quiet terrace over the sea where she had lunched, the lonely restaurant, the windows of that suite of rooms open on to the terrace. A broad column of light streamed out from the window in her vision. She could almost hear voices and the sound of laughter, she imagined the laughter all struck dumb, and thereafter a cry of horror stabbing the night. The very silence of the villa became a torture to her. She rose and walked restlessly about the room. If she could only have reached Warrisden! But she did not even know to which hotel in all the hotels of Monte Carlo he had gone. Tony might have told her that, had she kept her wits about her and put the question with discretion. But she had not. She had no doubt that Stretton had purposely left him behind. Tony wished for no restraining hand, when at last he came face to face with Lionel Callon. She sat down, and tried to reason out what would happen. Tony would go first to Eze. Would he find Millie there? Perhaps. Most likely he would not. He would go on then to the restaurant on the Corniche road. But he would have wasted some time. It might be only a little time, still, however short it was, what was waste of time to Tony might be gain of time to her--if only she could find a messenger.
Suddenly she stood up. There was a messenger, under her very hand. She scribbled a note to Lionel Callon, hardly knowing what she wrote. She bade him go the instant when he received it, go at all costs without a moment's delay. Then, taking the note in her hand, she ran from the villa down the road to Roquebrune.
CHAPTER XXX
[M. GIRAUD AGAIN]
The dusk was deepening quickly into darkness. As she ran down the open stretch of hillside between her villa and the little town, she saw the lights blaze out upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. Far below her, upon her right, they shone like great opals, each with a heart of fire. Pamela stopped for a second to regain her breath before she reached Roquebrune. The sudden brightness of those lights carried her thoughts backwards to the years when the height of trouble for her had been the sickness of a favourite horse, and all her life was an eager expectation. On so many evenings she had seen those lights flash out through the gathering night while she had sat talking in her garden with the little schoolmaster whom she was now to revisit. To both of them those lights had been a parable. They had glowed in friendliness and promise--thus she had read the parable--out of a great, bright, gay world of men and women, upon a cool, twilit garden of youth and ignorance. She thought of what had come in place of all that imagined gaiety. To the schoolmaster, disappointment and degradation; while, as for herself, she felt very lonely upon this evening. "The world is a place of great sadness." Thus had M. Giraud spoken when Pamela had returned to Roquebrune from her first season in London, and the words now came back to her again.