The two young men paused as if arrested by some power over which they had no control, and as they stood gazing at each other, Chris, waiting for Glyddyr to speak, a crowd of thoughts flashed through his brain.
Claude—alone—her own mistress, what of your triumph now!
Very different were Glyddyr’s thoughts. Claude was somehow mixed up with them, but he read in his rival’s eye distrust, suspicion, and a hidden knowledge of his latest acts; and they passed on rapidly through his mind, till he saw Chris Lisle denouncing him as a murderer and about to seize him then.
Neither spoke, and after the long, intense gaze of eye into eye had lasted some moments, each went his way, one back to his yacht to try and make up his mind whether he ought to call at once, the other home to sit down and write to Claude, and tell her that he was always hers, and that in this, her terrible hour of affliction, he was longing to try and share her pain.
“And if I said that,” thought Chris, as he slowly tore up the letter, “she would think it an insult, and that I am triumphing over the dead.”
So Chris’s letter, full of the tender love he felt, never reached Claude’s hand.