"Only your wife says the man is Captain Dering; and--and, by Jove! I believe she is right."
"Of course I'm right," she sobbed, half hysterically--"I knew he would come--I knew he wouldn't leave me to die alone!"
Eugene Smith laid down his rifle, and crawled over in cover deliberately, with an odd look on his face.
"Yes! that's Dering; plucky fellow. He's swung himself up. I always knew he was a nailing gymnast."
There was no grudge in his voice, only a curious challenge as he looked at his wife, then laid his big hand on her shoulder. "Keep more down, please--your head's showing. He'll get here, all right, never fear; we'll lower a rope to him when he comes alongside."
"But I would rather look--I'd rather see anything happen--" she moaned; "it seems so unkind not to watch--not to be there--with him--" She was shivering all over, the patient self-control, the steady acquiescence even in her own danger which had been hers till then, gone utterly.
George Dillon felt a great pity, a vast impatience.
"So you were right, Smith," he broke in hastily, to cover her sudden break down. "They aren't killed; now we shall have a chance of knowing what's at the bottom of all this foolery!"
But when, five minutes later, Vincent Dering reached the roof in safety, the doctor felt vaguely that the explanations only added to the general incomprehensibility; and that something was being kept back. What, he asked impatiently, had started the show?
Of course there were plots. Pidar Narâyan knew of them, but, as such things generally did, they had seemed abortive. What, then, had upset the apple-cart?