A smoldering fire kindled in his eyes as he gazed at her. He half leaned from the saddle—half put out his hand.
But at his movement she dropped the mask. She laughed in open scorn. “A fig for your hate!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “I have no liking for George Gordon, but he was never a sneak at any rate!”
The man to whom she spoke struck savage spurs to his horse. As he wheeled, she swept him a curtsy from the carriage seat. “Joy to your task!” she cried, and drove on with her lips curled.
“He doesn’t know Gordon is near Ravenna,” she thought presently. “If he gives one of his free entertainments at the inn to-night, there may be an interesting meeting. What a pity I shall miss it!” and she laughed.
A little further on, the carriage turned to the westward toward the Swiss frontier.
As Trevanion reined the animal he bestrode to its haunches at the porch of the osteria, where Jane Clermont’s wagonette had waited, he looked back along the road with a muttered curse. Then he kicked a sleeping hound from the step and went in with an assumed limp and a swagger.
Two hours later, when the early dusk had fallen, and the ghostly disk that had hung all day in the sky was yellowing above the olive-trees, George Gordon flung his bridle wearily to a groom at the inn. His face was set and thwarted. He had been to the convent, to find that a wall had suddenly reared between him and the possession of his child. To surmount this would mean publicity, an appeal to British authority, red tape, a million Italian delays,—perhaps failure then.
As he stood, listening to the stir of the inn he was about to enter, a low voice suddenly spoke from the shadow of a hedge: “Excellence!”
Turning he recognized the huge frame of the gondolier who had borne Teresa from the Piazza San Marco on the night she had come to warn him. His heart leaped into his throat. Had the man followed him from Venice? Did he bring a message from her?