‘Why, yes. Your daughter and Bennett Hamlyn, you know.’
Mrs Hipgrave surveyed me from top to toe. Her aspect was very severe; then she delivered herself of the following remark:
‘I can never be sufficiently thankful,’ she said, with eyes upturned towards the sky, ‘that my poor dear girl found out her mistake in time.’
‘I have the utmost regard for Miss Beatrice,‘ I rejoined, ‘but I will not differ from you, Mrs Hipgrave.’
I must shift the scene again back to the island that I loved. For his Majesty’s clemency justified the Ambassador’s belief in it, and Neopalia was restored to Phroso and to me. Thither we went in the spring of the next year, leaving Denny inconsolable behind, but accompanied by old Hogvardt and by Watkins. This time we went straight out by sea from England, and the new crew of my yacht was more trustworthy than when Spiro and Demetri (ah, I had nearly written ‘poor Demetri,’ when the fellow was a murderer!) were sent by the cunning of Constantine Stefanopoulos to compose it. We landed this time to meet no threatening looks. The death-chant that One-eyed Alexander wrote was not raised when we entered the old grey house on the hill, looking over the blue waters. Ulysses is fabled by the poet to have—well, to put it plainly—to have grown bored with peaceful Ithaca. I do not know whether I shall prove an Ulysses in that and live to regret the new-born tranquillity of Neopalia. In candour, the early stormy days have a great attraction, and I love to look back to them in memory. So strong was this feeling upon me that it led me to refuse a request of my wife’s—the only one of hers which I have yet met in that fashion; for when we had been two or three days in the island—I spent one, by the way, in visiting the graves of my dead friends and enemies, a most suggestive and soothing occupation—I saw, as I walked with her through the hall of our house, mason’s tools and mortar lying near where the staircase led up, hard by the secret door; and Phroso said to me:
BACK TO NEOPALIA.
‘I’m sure you’d like to have that horrible secret passage blocked up, Charley. It’s full of terrible memories.’
‘My dear Phroso, wall up the passage?’