When she came hurriedly down again, after an absence of a few seconds only, she was red and shy. Stammering out her excuses, she said that only two persons could be shown through the mansion at one time, and singling out Repton and Southerley, she opened a door on her left hand and showed them in, while she beckoned to the mortified Bayre to follow her to the door by which he had entered.
“Oh, come, I say! We don’t want to go in unless we can all go,” cried Repton, in astonishment.
But Bayre, who understood that his uncle meant to forbid him, and him alone, the house, waved his hand in token that they were to go without him, and hurried, without a word, out of the house.
He was in a tumult of irritated feeling. As he threw one glance up at the windows of the mansion which was so undeservedly closed to him, he caught sight of the face of Miss Eden, pale and constrained, looking out. Most unreasonably he at once decided that this girl had somehow had a hand in his discomfiture, and it was with a feeling of fierce dislike—or at least he thought it was—and of defiance that he raised his hat to her and at once dashed into the avenue and disappeared from her sight.
He could not understand the effect the sight of this girl had upon him. If he had felt irritated before at his uncle’s refusal to allow him to enter his house, that feeling was as nothing to the burning indignation he experienced at the thought that this bit of a girl, this restless, hysterical, fidgety girl, as he had, in his utter ignorance, called her, should have been a witness of the gross outrage which had just been put upon him.
It was in vain he told himself that he did not care what she saw or what she thought, that she was a capricious, malicious creature who had herself urged his uncle not to have anything to do with him.
He could not forget her face; he could not get over his annoyance. As he walked out from under the avenue trees into the winter sunshine he felt as if unseen eyes were upon him, as if undiscoverable throats were muttering hoarse laughter from the shelter of the brambles and the dead ferns that he passed.
But these fancies presently grew into the knowledge that he was indeed being watched, not by an unseen elfish being, but by the morose-looking man in blouse and peaked cap whom they had passed at the farmhouse. And, discovering suddenly a likeness between this individual and the girl who had opened the door of the mansion, Bayre had no difficulty in deciding that they were father and daughter, and guessed that these were the two people of whom he had heard—the rulers of the island under his uncle, the spies, Vazon and his daughter Marie.
Bayre had an uncomfortable feeling that this man knew of the slight which had been put upon him, and that he had been told off to watch him until he should have left the island. Full of fury as this suspicion crossed his mind, the young man resolved not to linger about for his friends but to return at once to the boat and to wait for them there.
He was, however, drawn aside by the beauty of a singular natural curiosity which came in his way when he drew near the coast, one of those strange, funnel-like openings down through the cliffs to the sea which are such a feature of these islands. Peering down the wide opening through the green growth and dead bracken which formed a graceful fringe around the opening, Bayre was fascinated by the long dark vista, and by the sight and the sound of the incoming tide dashing little waves of feathery foam against the funnel’s sides.