“You’re unnecessarily frank,” Clare answered with a blush. “Since you couldn’t steal away, wouldn’t it have been better not to hint that I was anxious to avoid you? After all, I could have done so if I had really wanted.”
“I expect that’s true. Of course what happened when we last met couldn’t trouble you as it troubled me.”
“Are you trying to be tactful now?” Clare asked, smiling.
“No; it’s my misfortune that I haven’t much tact. If I had, I might be able to straighten matters out.”
“Don’t you understand that they can’t be straightened out?”
“I don’t,” Dick answered stubbornly. “For all that, I won’t trouble you again until I find a way out of the tangle.”
Clare gave him a quick, disturbed look. “It would be much better if you took it for granted that we must, to some extent, be enemies.”
“No. I’m afraid your father and I are enemies, but that’s not the same.”
“It is; you can see that it must be,” Clare insisted; and then, as if anxious to change the subject, went on: “He was too busy to bring me to-night so I came with Don Sebastian and his wife. It is not very gay in Santa Brigida and one gets tired of being alone.”
Her voice fell a little as she concluded, and Dick, who understood something of her isolation from friends of her race, longed to take her in his arms and comfort her. Indeed, had the quarter-deck been deserted he might have tried, for he felt that her refusal had sprung from wounded pride and a sense of duty. There was something in her manner that hinted that it had not been easy to send him away. Yet he saw she could be firm and thought it wise to follow her lead.