Just outside the harbour, plainly distinguishable in the moonlight, lay a great cruiser, her searchlights whipping the sky and sea with long white lashes.
The gaping, awe-struck crowd in the street parted to let Chase pass through on his way to the bungalow. He was riding one of Wyckholme's thoroughbreds, a fiery, beautiful grey. His manner was that of a medieval conqueror. He looked neither to right nor to left, but kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring the islanders as completely as if they did not exist.
"It's more like a Christian Endeavour meeting than it was ten minutes ago," he was saying to himself, all the time wondering when some reckless unbeliever would hurl a knife at his back. He gravely winked his eye in the direction of the château. "Good old Britt!" he muttered in his exultation.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LANTERN ABOVE
Chase sat for hours on his porch that night, gazing down upon the château. Lights gleamed in a hundred of its windows. He knew that revelry held forth in what he was pleased enough to call the feudal castle, and yet his heart warmed toward the gay people who danced and sang while he thirsted at the gates.
The bitterness of his own isolation, the ostracism that circumstance had forced upon him, would have been maddening on this night had not all rancour been tempered by the glorious achievement in the market-place. He wondered if the Princess knew what he had dared and what he had accomplished in the early hours of the night. He wondered if they had pointed out his solitary light to her—if, now and then, she bestowed a casual glance upon that twinkling star of his. The porch lantern hung almost directly above his head.
He was not fool enough to think that he had permanently pulled the wool over the eyes of the islanders. Sooner or later they would come to know that he had tricked them, and then—well, he could only shake his head in dubious contemplation of the hundred things that might happen. He smiled as he smoked, however, for he looked down upon a world that thought only of the night at hand.