"Of what?" he queried.
"Of many things. You would not understand if I should try to explain them."
"I do understand," he hastened to say. "But you have nothing to fear. Castle 'Cadia will merely gain an ally when Wingfield hears the story of the little war. Besides, I was not including your father's controversy with the Arcadia Company in the dramatic material; I was thinking more particularly of the curious and unaccountable happenings that are continually occurring on the work—the accidents."
"There is no connection between the two—in your mind?" she asked. She was looking away from him, and he could not see her face. But the question was eager, almost pathetically eager.
"Assuredly not," he denied promptly. "Otherwise——"
"Otherwise you wouldn't be here to-night as my father's guest, you would say. But others are not as charitable. Mr. Macpherson was one of them. He charged all the trouble to us, though he could prove nothing. He said that if all the circumstances were made public—" She faced him quickly, and he saw that the beautiful eyes were full of trouble. "Can't you see what would happen—what is likely to happen if Mr. Wingfield sees fit to make literary material out of all these mysteries?"
The Kentuckian nodded. "The unthinking, newspaper-reading public would probably make one morsel of the accidents and your father's known antagonism to the company. But Wingfield would be something less than a man and a lover if he could bring himself to the point of making literary capital out of anything that might remotely involve you or your father."
She shook her head doubtfully.
"You don't understand the artistic temperament. It's a passion. I once heard Mr. Wingfield say that a true artist would make copy out of his grandmother."
Ballard scowled. It was quite credible that the Lester Wingfields were lost to all sense of the common decencies, but that Elsa Craigmiles should be in love with the sheik of the caddish tribe was quite beyond belief.