“It was Dark’s business to find out. I should have employed a detective. When a thing’s to do, do it. Well, here’s the result! I’ve got myself into the devil of a mess —”
“You’ve been making love to Fanny.”
“I have—or rather—not been making love from my point of view—only she doesn’t see it in that light. I’ve been flirting like the deuce. When I got your note that morning, I took it for pure caprice. It seemed to me totally without excuse. You had promised faithfully to meet me every day. I had not a suspicion of the truth. Moreover, I had just received cables from California that stirred me up. They couldn’t understand my desertion at such a moment, and no wonder. To be told that I had come here for nothing—to be coolly asked to wait a week—to know that I had to stay whether I would or not—well, I felt as if hell had been let loose inside of me. Fanny brought the note —”
“Fanny!” Julia sprang to her feet. “Fanny? I didn’t give it to her.”
“She brought it all the same, and she looked something more than ripe for a flirtation, and beautiful —”
“You have fallen in love with her! I saw you this morning.”
“Oh, you did? Well, you didn’t see much. I am not in love with her, but—well, it’s got to be said—she’s in love with me, or thinks she is. I was treated to high tragedy an hour since in the garden of Bath House. I never for a moment thought she would take the thing seriously—have seen too many summer flirtations—American girls know exactly what that sort of thing means—but this girl might have Nevis inside of her. She wanted to elope with me to-night—threatens to drown herself —”
“Great heaven! What have you done?”
“I feel like Don Juan, of course, only as it happens I haven’t made downright love to her. I was on the edge of it once or twice, she’s so infernally pretty, but, well, hang it all, I’m in love with you to the limit, all the more so that you’re not dead easy game. If I hadn’t been, I’d have made love to her fast enough. But I flirted as hard as I know how, and she took that for love-making, thought I held back because I felt bound to you, and—well—it was the hateful things she said about you to-night that put me in a rage and made me hustle her back into the ball-room and into the arms of one of her other admirers. I had gone as far as I intended, and made up my mind, not two minutes before I got Lady Dark’s cable, to go to one of the other islands and wait for the steamer. When I got that cable, of course I understood. Now are you properly repentant? Why in thunder didn’t you tell me in your note —”
“Of course, I thought you knew—”