"We ran in this morning, and as the folks at the hotel told me you were here I came on," he said at length.
They asked him a few more questions, and it said a good deal for Mrs. Ratcliffe's courage that she invited him to stay there for comida and then to ride back to their hotel with them. Still it would, as she recognized, be useless to separate the men, since they would come across each other continually in Las Palmas, and she was one who knew that the boldest course is now and then the wisest. Desmond stayed, and it was some little time later when he sat alone with Lister among the tumbled lava by the watercourse. Feathery palm tufts drooped above them, and looking out between the fringed and fretted greenery they could see the blue expanse of sea. Beyond its sharp-cut eastern rim, as both of them were conscious, lay the shadowy land. Desmond turned from its contemplation and regarded his companion with a little smile.
"I heard a good deal about you in the hotel smoking room," he said. "I suppose I ought to compliment you on the possession of a certain amount of sense. Presumably you have now a motive for going steady?"
Lister flushed, but he met his companion's gaze without wavering. "As a matter of fact you are quite correct," he said. "Anyway, the motive is a sufficient one."
"Ah," said Desmond dryly, "it is in that case a lady, Miss Ratcliffe most probably? You no doubt recognize that she is several years older than you, and that it is more than possible her affections have been engaged before?"
His companion resolutely straightened himself. "It isn't as a rule advisable to go too far, but I don't mind informing you that they are not engaged now."
"You seem sure," said Desmond with more than a trace of his former dryness. "She has presumably told you so?"
"She has not," said Lister. "That is, however, quite sufficient in itself, because if there had been anyone else with the slightest claim on her she and her mother would certainly have found means of making it clear to me."
Desmond saw the glint in the lad's eyes, and could not quite repress a little sardonic smile. What he had heard in the hotel had at first been almost incomprehensible to him, but, as he listened to what the men he met there had to tell, it became clear that Lister had in reality turned from his former courses. Then came his own admission that it was Ada Ratcliffe who had inspired him. Desmond could have found it a relief to laugh. The woman who, it seemed, was willing to throw over his comrade and break her pledge to him that she might be free to marry a richer man was the one who had stirred the lad to what was probably a stern and valiant encounter with his baser nature. It seemed that she could not even be honest with him.
"Am I to understand that you have made up your mind to marry Miss Ratcliffe?" he asked.