"I was only just through the hole when he came, when he flashed his lantern at what he supposed was my body, recumbent on the bed. I was holding up the bed clothes from outside; I had not had time to shove the stones back into place."
She shuddered at the nearness of the hazard. Supposing the man had come at the very moment of escape—supposing?
"But the light?" she protested. "The light shone upon your face!"
He laughed again.
"The bed clothes had a hole in them!" he said. "I held them up into the form of human shoulders, and through a rent his lantern beat directly on my face! He could not, of course, see me, but I got a good view of him. It was Luigi himself, this time. Has Fate been whispering to him, do you think? Has she made him suspicious?"
She stumbled and caught at him to steady herself. He looked down in sudden, quick compunction.
"It has been too much for you!" he said anxiously. "You are feeling faint?"
"No!" she said quietly. "I am trying to think of it as a nightmare from which I shall wake directly, but it is real! Whenever that comes home to me it—it is a pain. Well, it will not be a long ordeal now, will it? We meet Fate at the landing stage, and she will give her decision. Can we unmoor the Santa Margarita from inside the breakwater, or can we not? She will know."
He nodded.
"In five minutes we, too, shall know. We are circling for the Marina now. A couple of hundred yards and we shall be there!"