Then they collapsed into their silvery laughter as they sat on the mossy ledge, and guyed him.
His remonstrances were obviously futile, but before he had time to attempt another Ruth spoke, suddenly serious.
"You know I have practised drawing faces so much—the individual features from the flat, and the whole countenance in the life class—that I have become just dead letter perfect in the discrimination of human physiognomy. I don't pretend to discern character, and all that sort of thing—to set up as a second Lavater—but a face with any distinctiveness that I have once seen I recognise on a second view."
Jardine felt a sudden premonition, as of discovery—a sudden inexplicable sinking of the heart. He looked at her intently as she paused, leaned aside, plucked a tiny flowering weed from a niche in the rock, and turned it in her gauntleted hands. Lucia, one elbow on the ledge behind her, gazed indifferently into the great encompassing stretch of the woods, where in the illuminated air there was a continual wafting down of the rich, glinting, yellow leaves.
"I thought I knew that young mountaineer the moment I saw him," continued Ruth. "And now I have placed the recollection. He is the young man who sat in front of us at the song-and-dance turn, disguised as an old man. I knew his eyes, and that slight rise in the bridge of his nose, breaking the insipidity of contour—very good shape."
Lucia was erect, looking at her with startled eyes. "Sure enough?" she said.
Ruth glanced at her with a laughing rebuke of the slang phrase. "Sure enough!" she assented.
"Why, that man was in the Ferris Wheel that night!" exclaimed Lucia. "And I am morally certain he slung a stone, or iron missile of some sort, and knocked this Mr. Lloyd out of the swing. Why didn't you tell him?"
"It only came to me a moment ago," said Ruth. "Besides, you know Mr. Jardine and Frank thought that idea was just our notion—the vapourings of semi-idiots."
She glanced with pink and beguiling smiles at Mr. Jardine, expecting his complimentary protest. But he was too seriously ill at ease to respond. He, too, had realised the belated recognition, realising as well that it was unconsciously at the root of his objection to the cave expedition, and his strong, though undefinable, uneasiness. He was thinking that if the mountaineer had had the motive and the venom to attack the manager, his vindictive rancour would not have been allayed by the ineffectiveness of his assault. He doubtless would make another attempt, and this with his unsuspecting victim at his mercy in the recesses and dangers of an unexplored cave. He remembered the guide's patent dismay when Frank Laniston joined the party, and he began to take comfort from the fact that the incident was evidently unpremeditated, and that the man was unable to cope with odds. If Lloyd and Laniston had but the discretion to keep together, as indeed they needs must, for the paucity of the means of light, no disaster might befall them. True they might be led into difficult and remote labyrinths and left—the lantern extinguished—to wander till they fell into abysses, or perished with hunger.