Her eyes thanked me, but she made no reply and sank back in her chair with an air of relief. I uttered a few commonplaces about the weather and the yacht, worked round to the subject of Lisbon and then to that of my supposed purpose in the city. For once the concessions were of use, as they enabled me to describe my own acts and intentions in regard to her as if I were referring to the concessions.
“Of course I shall find difficulties—indeed the whole position is entirely different from my anticipations. I ought to have been here earlier. But it was impossible. After my father’s stroke of paralysis which took me at a moment’s notice from Paris, he lay between life and death for three months; and although I was as anxious then as now about these concessions and should have come at once to Lisbon, I could not leave him for any purpose, however vital and important to me.”
“No, of course not,” she murmured, not raising her eyes from the deck.
“But now that I am here, of course I shall not abandon my efforts to obtain them until they are actually in the possession of some one else. I have heard that they are promised, but I shall not regard that as an actual barrier.”
She moved slightly and answered in a voice firm but low: “From what I have heard you will only be wasting time and effort, Mr. Donnington. You will not be allowed to—to obtain them.”
“You think the unsettled condition of political matters here, the cabals and intrigues and so on, will interfere with me?”
“I am sure of it,” she said very deliberately.
“You mean there are obstacles of which I know nothing. As for those I do know, I care nothing for them.”
“It depends upon what you do know.” Every word was uttered in a low tense monotone, full charged with suppressed feeling.
“I know, as I say, that they are promised to some one else, but that doesn’t count with me. I know too that they are involved in the secret plans of some of those whose political objects are opposed to the professed objects of some leaders of the League of Portugal. But that also I will not regard as an insuperable barrier.”