Such a woman he could trust!
But had Hammond been a witness to what took place on the beach after he left he assuredly would not have been so easy of mind. He might have been turned white-hot with jealousy.
Or, being the sound philosopher that he was, in spite of his youth, he might have reasoned that under stress of certain circumstances the best of women will do strange things.
CHAPTER XI
CAPTAIN CARLSTONE, V. C.
I
Josephine Stone did not look back after Acey Smith led her down the lakeshore from the spot where she had parted with Louis Hammond. She knew Hammond would neither attempt to follow them nor spy upon them from a distance. Perhaps too she was preoccupied with the tensity of new sensations she did not quite understand. Had she been inclined to mental analysis she might have contrasted the reactions upon herself the presence of the two men brought about; the one frank, buoyant, purposeful and full of the verve and enthusiasm of youth—the other in the prime of his vigour; masterful, grimly fascinating under his cloak of mystery and conscious power.
What discerning, womanly woman is not drawn irresistibly by the type of men who curb tremendous potentialities under a poise that outwardly bespeaks merely good form and the niceties of the occasion? It was not “side” with this man; it was patent he was what he was for a definite purpose. More, to the sensitive intuition of Josephine Stone there appealed from out of the deeps of the personality of Acey Smith a great latent tragedy—a something persistently repressed by that fatalistic mouth that could set so grim and straight—a something that smouldered at times in his brooding eyes and flickered ever so elusively over the face he had taught to be a cold, cruel mask.
If she did not analyse, she at least felt these things in her feminine way. It was this impression, perhaps, that impelled her to say as they strolled to the log seat by the whispering surf: “Sometimes, Mr. Smith, this place seems to me like an enchanted forest—like a dream inset in the prosaic course of everyday life.”
“Does it appeal to you that way, Miss Stone?” He led her to the log seat and dropped down near her. “Strange, isn’t it, how some life-incidents flicker by us with all the glamour of a dream—leaving us wondering, in a floundering sort of way, if it wasn’t a fleeting mirage, so to speak, from some other existence.”
“You express it so wonderfully! You think then that all of us have experienced previous existences on this or some other sphere?”