"You are hurt," she said.
My right hand was resting upon the table. It was cut in one or two places, and covered with scratches.
"It is nothing," said I, "I slipped on the hill yesterday night and cut it with the gorse;" and again we fell to silence.
"What I am thinking is this," she said, at length. "You overtook Cullen upon the road, and you reached the islands last night. At any moment then we may expect his coming."
"Why, that's true," said I, springing up to my feet. "And if Dick will sail me across to St. Mary's, we'll make a shift to stop him."
Helen Mayle rose at that moment from her seat. She was wearing a white frock, and upon one side of it I noticed for the first time a red smear or two, as though she had brushed against paint--or blood. I looked at my hand scratched and torn by the gorse bush. It would have been bleeding at the time when a woman, coming swiftly past us in the fog, brushed against it. The woman was certainly hurrying in the direction of this house.
"You have told me everything, I suppose," I said--"everything at all events that it concerns me to know."
"Everything," she replied.
We crossed that afternoon to St. Mary's. There was no sign of Cullen Mayle at Hugh Town. No one had seen him or heard of his coming. He had not landed upon St. Mary's. I thought it possible that he might not have touched St. Mary's at all, but rowed ashore to Tresco even as I had done. But no ship had put into the Road that day but one which brought Castile soap from Marseilles. We sailed back to Tresco, and ran the boat's nose into the sand not twenty yards from the door of the house on Merchant's Point. A man, an oldish, white-haired man, loitering upon the beach very civilly helped us to run the boat up out of the water. We thanked him, and he touched his hat and answered with something of a French accent, which surprised me. But as we walked up to the house,
"That's one of the five," Dick explained. "He came on the boat with the negro to Penzance. Peter Tortue he is called, and he was loitering there on purpose to get a straight look at you."