The startled eyes veiled themselves swiftly, and Virginia's voice sank to its softest cadence.
“Have I been an accomplice,” she began, “in this—this despicable thing, Uncle Somerville?”
Mr. Darrah began a little to see his mistake.
“Ah—an accomplice? Oh, no, my deah Virginia, not quite that. The word smacks too much of the po-lice cou'ts. Let us say that Misteh Winton has found your company mo' attractive than that of his laborehs, and commend his good taste in the matteh.”
So much he said by way of damping down the fire he had so rashly lighted. Then Jastrow came in with one of the interminable cipher telegrams and Virginia was left alone.
For a time she sat at the deserted breakfast-table, dry-eyed, hot-hearted, thinking such thoughts as would come crowding thickly upon the heels of such a revelation. Winton would fail: a man with honor, good repute, his entire career at stake, as he himself had admitted, would go down to miserable oblivion and defeat, lacking some friendly hand to smite him alive to a sense of his danger. And, in her uncle's estimation, at least, she, Virginia Carteret, would figure as the Delilah triumphant.
She rose, tingling to her finger-tips with the shame of it, went to her state-room, and found her writing materials. In such a crisis her methods could be as direct as a man's. Winton was coming again that evening. He must be stopped and sent about his business.
So she wrote him a note, telling him he must not come—a note man-like in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come. And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon to undertake its delivery.
When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss Carteret's mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new line.
Truth to tell, Virginia's messenger was not unwilling to spend a little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss Bessie, ennuyé on the one hand and despondent on the other.