"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"
"We are, and I hope we always shall be."
"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a place!"
"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul of the Estate to me."
Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she, instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.
She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful softening of her bold, flamboyant beauty; for I was not looking through her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had spoken without a certain intonation, which I had hardly noticed in her speech until I missed it now.
"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise the terms that they were on.
"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he and I were to have kept to ourselves.
"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.
"Oh! I don't know."