"Hm!" Hannaford grumbled, frowning. But he thought quickly, and it seemed to him that perhaps even Lady Dauntrey's chaperonage might be better than none. There was nothing against the woman, as far as he knew, except that she whitewashed her face and had strange eyes. The rich Mrs. Ernstein, who was staying at the Villa Bella Vista, was undoubtedly—even dully—respectable, if common. Neither was there any real harm in Miss Wardropp; and poor Dauntrey did not seem to be a bad fellow at heart.
"It's not ideal there, I'm afraid," Hannaford said at last, "but for lack of a better refuge it might do."
Mary felt suddenly as if some very little thing far down in herself was struggling blindly to escape, as a fly struggles to escape when a glass tumbler has been shut over it on a table. She drew in a long, deep breath.
"I'll leave the Hôtel de Paris to-morrow," she said, as if to settle the matter with herself once and for all. "And I'll go and stay at Lady Dauntrey's."
Almost unconsciously her eyes were fixed upon the old hill town of Roquebrune, asleep under the square height of its ruined castle, which the moon streaked with silver. All the little firefly lights of the village had died out except one, which still shone "like a good deed in a naughty world."
"It is perhaps the curé's light," Mary thought; and told herself that as he was a friend of the Prince, she would never dare to go and see him now.
XVIII
Vanno stood without moving for some minutes, when Mary had gone. She had forbidden him to follow, but it was not her command which held him back. It was the command laid upon him by himself. In a light merciless as the crude glare of electricity he saw himself standing stricken, a fool who had done an unforgivable thing, a clumsy and brutal wretch who had broken a crystal vase in a sanctuary. For the blinding light showed him a new image of Mary, even as she had suddenly revealed herself to Hannaford: a perfectly innocent creature whose ways were strange as a dryad's way would be strange if transplanted from her forests into the most sophisticated colony in Europe.
Something in Vanno which knew, because it felt, had always pronounced her guiltless; but all of him that was modern and worldly had told him to distrust her. Now he was like a judge who has condemned a prisoner on circumstantial evidence, to find out the victim's innocence after the execution.