The summer was drawing to its close while Saxon still wavered. Unless he faced the charge that seemed impending near the equator, he must always stand, before himself at least, convicted. Yet, Duska was immovable in her decision, and Steele backed her intuition with so many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris market. He had included the landscape painted on the cliff, on the day when the purple flower lured him over the edge, and the portrait of the girl. These pictures, however, he specified, were only for exhibition, and were not under any circumstances to be sold.
Each day, he insisted on the necessity of his investigation, and argued it with all the forcefulness he could command, but Duska steadfastly overruled him.
Once, as the sunset dyed the west with the richness of gold and purple and orange and lake, they were walking their horses along a hill lane between pines and cedars. The girl’s eyes were drinking in the color and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at her saddle skirt. She had silenced his continual argument after her usual decisive fashion. Now, she turned her head, and demanded:
“Suppose you went and settled this, would you be nearer your certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would leave you where you were before Señor Ribero told his story.”
“It would mean this much,” he argued. “I should have followed to its end every clew that was given me. I should have exhausted the possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest to destiny. I could go on feeling that I had a right to abandon the past because I had questioned it as far as I knew.”
She was resolute.
“I should,” he urged, “feel that in letting you share the danger I had at least tried to end it.”
She raised her chin almost scornfully, and her eyes grew deeper.
“Do you think that danger can affect my love? Are we the sort of people who have no eyes in our hearts, and no hearts in our eyes, who live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods love? I want to love you that way—audaciously—taking every chance. If the stars up there love, they love like that.”
Some days later, Mrs. Horton again referred to her wish to make the trip to Venezuela. To the man’s astonishment, Duska appeared this time more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all reconsider her refusal to be her aunt’s traveling companion. Later, when they were alone, he questioned her, and she laughed with the note of having a profound secret. At last, she explained.