Then her thoughts wandered to the crippled hunchback, and her heart thrilled with gratitude as she thought of his kindness; Mrs. Whiting had said that he was a nobleman, but there had evidently been a mistake; very likely the simple-minded landlady had concluded that no one traveling with a man-servant could be less than a man of title.
Leslie thought of the two men—but most of "Yorke"—and all they had said and done for some time before Ralph Duncombe insisted upon his share in her reflections, and as she thought of him she sighed. She pitied him, and was sorry for him, but she did not want to see him again. He had frightened as well as touched her by the passionate avowal which had accompanied the ring.
The ring! She had utterly forgotten it! She put her hand to her pocket, turned it out, but the ring was not there. What had she done with it? It was fast closed in her hand, she remembered, when she heard Dick's piteous yap; and then she had sprung up, and run down the beach. She must have dropped it among the pebbles.
Her heart smote her reproachfully. The least she could do in return for the passionate love Ralph Duncombe had lavished so uselessly upon her was to keep his ring! She rose, troubled and remorseful. The tide had been going out when she dropped it; it was not likely that it would be seen by any one, and it was probably lying where it had fallen. She seemed to see the plain gold circlet lying there in the silent night, neglected and despised.
Her hat and jacket lay on the bed; she snatched them up, put them on hastily, and left the house.
A light burned behind the windows of Marine Villa opposite, and she glanced up at it, trying to picture to herself the two men in the sitting-room; the one so strong and stalwart, the other so weak and crippled.
As she went quickly down the street she was conscious of a new and strange feeling; it was half pleasant, half painful. It seemed to her as if some spirit of change had entered her quiet, peaceful, uneventful life, as if she were on the verge of some novel experience. The feeling disquieted her. She looked up at the stars almost hidden by the haze of the glorious light thrown broadcast by the moon, and there came into her mind some verses—they were from the Persian, though she did not know it—which she had seen under a picture in one of the Academy exhibitions—
"Love is abroad to-night; his wings
Beat softly at Heaven's gate!"
Murmuring the musical lines, she passed to the quay, and leaping lightly onto the beach, made her way to the breakwater.