“The moment the captain returns, I shall ask him if this was in his possession, and how he came by it. Perhaps Lucia sold or lost it, and it fell into the hands of some dealer, from whom he may have bought it. Yes, that must be so.”
Captain Desfrayne would probably not return for a couple of hours. Gilardoni must wait with what patience he could muster. By dint of arguing with himself, he at length almost arrived at the conclusion that during his tour in Italy the captain had purchased the gold cross.
That Captain Desfrayne had ever been acquainted with Lucia Guiscardini, he did not for a moment dream.
If the thought came into his mind that the cross had been a gift from la Lucia to the young Englishman, he dismissed it as utterly improbable.
The sudden finding of the trinket that bore so many mingled recollections with it had made him feel faint and sick from emotion, and as the slow minutes wore away he grew paler and paler.
“She wears diamonds now that emperors scarce could buy,” he said to himself, contemplating that tiny love-gift, “yet I doubt if any of the gems that cluster in her jewel-boxes have given her half the rapture of vanity and pleasure that thrilled her false heart when I clasped this little gewgaw about her neck. She pretended she loved me, and returned my kiss—and I had the folly to believe her true. Folly, folly, folly! Some day I may have her at my feet, and then—aye, then——”
He clenched his hand with frenzied rage.
And all the time Paul Desfrayne was riding, he scarce cared whither, under the soft, genial sunshine, that made the landscape seem a fairy-land—riding onward, the sport of fate, to rivet yet another link in the chain of his strange, fevered life.
CHAPTER XVII.
IN THE THUNDER-STORM.