Carfax chuckled softly.
“You are a wild ass of the plains, Vance. It is borne in upon me that I shall have to marry her out of hand to bring you to your senses.”
“The quicker the better,” said Tregarvon gloomily. “There is no use in prolonging the agony.”
“Then you’ll admit that it is an agony?”
“I can’t joke about it, Poictiers. I have made the one crowning blunder that spoils a man’s life. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not going to be either a fool or a scoundrel. I shall marry Elizabeth and try to make her as happy as I can; but it will be without prejudice to the fact that I didn’t know what love was when I promised her. I can imagine just how brutal that sounds to you, but it’s the truth.”
“The truth is always rather brutal, isn’t it?” Then the golden youth permitted himself a word that he rarely used. “I’m damned sorry for Elizabeth.”
“As I told you once before, you needn’t be,” Tregarvon snapped back. “There is absolutely no question of sentiment between us, and there has never been. You’d appreciate that if you should read her letters to me; letters in answer to my babblings about Richardia. If Elizabeth had a spark of sentiment in her she would have sent me packing long ago. I’ve told her pretty nearly everything there was to tell.”
“I suppose you have. That is one of your amiable weaknesses—to tell some woman, any woman who happens to be within reach, a lot of things that no woman ought to be told. You deserve all that is coming to you, Vance.”
“I suppose I do,” Tregarvon admitted; and beyond this the silence came to its own again. After a time, Carfax suggested quizzically that the ghosts might be too bashful to come out while there were two able-bodied watchers in sight; and at that they went inside to find seats on a coil of rope opposite the open door. Before long, the interior darkness began to make Tregarvon sleepy and he had quite lost himself when a touch of Carfax’s hand aroused him.
“Look steadily at the big oak just beyond the engine—the one where we found the tripod marks,” was the whispered injunction. “Do you see anything?”