"Put your hand on my knee, just for a moment, Lou. I think I shall go mad if I don't feel your touch."
She did as he asked her, and he was silent until the last note of the barcarolle died away in a softly murmured breath.
"What a cowardly wretch I am," he said under cover of the wave of enthusiastic applause which effectually covered the sound of his voice to all ears save hers. "I think I would sell my soul for a touch of your hand, and all the while I know that with every word I am playing the part of a coward. If Colonel Harris heard me he would give me a sound thrashing. A dog whip is what I deserve."
"I have told you," she rejoined simply, "that father does not wish our engagement to be broken off. He sticks to your cause and will do so through thick and thin. He still believes that this Philip is an impostor, and thinks that Lord Radclyffe has taken leave of his senses."
She spoke quite quietly, matter-of-factly now, pulling, by her serene calm, Luke's soul back from the realms of turbulent sensations to the prosy facts of to-day. And he—in answer to her mute dictate and with a movement wholly instinctive and mechanical—drew himself upright, and passed his hand over his ruffled hair, and the jeopardized immaculateness of shirt front and cuffs.
"Philip de Mountford," he said simply, "is no impostor, Lou. He has been perfectly straightforward; and Mr. Dobson for one, who has seen all his papers, thinks that there is no doubt whatever that he is Uncle Arthur's son. His clerk—Mr. Downing—went out to Martinique, you know, and his first letters came a day or two ago. All inquiries give the same result, and Downing says that it is quite easy to trace the man's life, step by step, from his birth in St. Pierre, past the dark days of the earthquake and the lonely life at Marie-Galante. Mrs. de Mountford was a half-caste native, as we all suspected, but the marriage was unquestionably legal. Downing has spoken to people in Martinique and also in Marie-Galante, who knew her and her son, or at any rate, of them. I cannot tell you everything clearly, but there are a great many links in a long chain of evidence, and so far Mr. Dobson and his clerk have not come across a broken one. That the Mrs. de Mountford who died at Marie-Galante was Uncle Arthur's wife, and that Philip is his son, I am afraid no one can question. He has quite a number of letters in his possession which Uncle Arthur wrote after he had practically abandoned wife and child. I think it was the letters that convinced Uncle Rad."
"Lord Radclyffe," she remarked dryly, "has taken everything far too much for granted."
"He is convinced, Lou—and that's all about it."
"He is," she retorted more hotly than was her wont, "acting in a cruel and heartless manner. Even if this Philip is your uncle Arthur's son, even if he is heir to the peerage and the future head of the family, there was no reason for installing him in your home, Luke, and turning you and the others out of it."
"I suppose," rejoined Luke philosophically, "the house was never really our home. What Uncle Rad gave freely, he has taken away again from us. I don't suppose that we have the right to complain."