Miss Julia gave me the smile I wanted. I felt I had gone up in her estimation, and sent Delavoye down. But I had reckoned without his genius for taking a dilemma by the horns.
"This is an old quarrel between Gillon and me, Miss Brabazon. I hold that all Witching Hill is more or less influenced by the wicked old wizard of the place. Mr. Gillon says it's all my eye, and simply will not let belief take hold of him. Yet your Turkish building actually existed within a few feet of where we're sitting now; and suppose the very leaves on the trees still whisper about it to those who have ears to hear; suppose you've taken the whole thing down almost at dictation! I don't know how your story goes on, Miss Brabazon——"
"No more do I," said Miss Brabazon, manifestly impressed and not at all offended by his theory. "It's a queer thing—I never should have thought of such a thing myself—but I certainly did dash it all off as if somebody was telling me what to say, and at such a rate that my mind's still a blank from one page to the next."
She picked the script out of her lap, and we watched her bewildered face as it puckered to a frown over the rustling sheets.
"I shouldn't wonder," said Delavoye a little hastily, "if his next effort wasn't to subvert her religious beliefs."
"To make game of them!" assented Miss Julia in scandalised undertones. "'The demoniacal Duke now set himself to deface and destroy the beauty of holiness, to cast away the armour of light, and to put upon him the true colours of an aristocratic atheist of the deepest dye.'"
"Exactly what he did," murmured Uvo, with another look at me. It was not a look of triumph unalloyed; it was at least as full of vivid apprehension.
"I shall cross that out," said Miss Julia decidedly. "I don't know what I was thinking of to write anything like that. It really makes me almost afraid to go on."
Uvo shot out a prompt and eager hand.
"Will you let me take it away to finish by myself, Miss Brabazon?"