Madame de Charleroi's grey eyes were wide and bright, and a very faint colour rose to her cheeks as she told the story. The calm, regal woman took a genuine delight in great actions, and as she turned to Julius at the end there was a ring of real sympathy and friendship and regret in her voice that it gave Leonora a strange sensation to hear.
"It was magnificently brave!" exclaimed Leonora in English, and she looked at Julius as though she admired him with all her heart and soul.
She had always had a feeling that he had probably made himself remarkable in such ways, but he always had told her that his life had been uneventful. To think that this calm, smooth, well-dressed, fine gentleman should have saved a whole shipload of lives by sheer strength and courage! Ah, he was a man, indeed!
But Batiscombe never moved. He stood looking seaward, his eyelids half closed, and a thoughtful look on his brown face. Indeed, he was thinking deeply, but not so much of the old story Diana had been telling as of herself. The strange appeal in her last words had touched the good chord in his wayward heart, and he was thinking how fair his life might have been with her,—and how dark it had been without her. And the old true love rose up for one moment, hiding Leonora and the rest, and all the intervening years, and sending hot words to his ready lips. He turned in the act to speak, forgetting where he was,—then checked himself. Both Leonora and Diana had seen that he was going to say something, for they were watching him. He hesitated.
"I ought to thank you, madame," he said to Diana, "for gilding my adventure so richly. But as for the thing itself, and the doing of such things, the opportunity seldom offers, and the faculty for doing them is the result of an excellent digestion and quiet nerves. Meanwhile it is grown cooler, and the boats are below. Shall we go down, and sail a little before dinner?"
The two ladies consented readily enough, and they all descended to the landing and got into one of the boats and pushed away.
"I shall have quite a new sensation in future when I sail with you, Mr. Batiscombe," said Leonora. "It would be impossible to be drowned with you on board."
But Diana was pale again, and settled herself among the cushions in silence.
Far up above, Marcantonio was interviewing the coachman on the terrace. He looked down and saw the boat shoot out with the three members of his household. He rubbed his hands smoothly together.
"Ha," he said to himself, "it is superb! What good friends they are all growing to be! En vérité, Batiscombe is a most amiable man, full of tact."