The girl nodded. “We haven’t any use for that word in our country. In fact, we have rather a liking for a presumptuous man so long as he is sensible,” she said. “Then there is nothing I can do for you there?”
“No,” said Appleby.
Nettie leaned a little nearer him, and though she smiled a faint flush crept into her cheek. “If there were, you would tell me? I can’t help remembering what you did for me.”
“I think I would. Still, you see there is nothing.”
“Well, I’m not quite sure, and one never knows who they may meet in England. It’s quite a small place, anyway.”
Then there was a ringing of steel on stone, and she looked round with a little impatient gesture as she said, “Here is that odious Morales again!”
The banker rose, and brought a chair as the colonel came forward, but the little pressure of the girl’s hand on his arm warned Appleby that she desired him to remain, and for an hour they discussed the campaign. Then Appleby decided to relate what had happened at the hacienda a few nights earlier, though he said very little about the papers and nothing concerning the hidden receptacle. Morales, he fancied, listened with eagerness, and once his dark eyes flashed.
“You were wrong when you let him go,” he said. “If it happens again I should suggest the pistol. One gains nothing by showing those gentlemen toleration.”
Then he shrugged his shoulders, and turned to the banker’s wife with a smile; but Appleby had noticed the vindictiveness in his tone, and as he surmised it was not accounted for by the fact that the man had broken into Harding’s office, wondered whether it was because he had failed to accomplish his purpose. He, however, felt that Nettie Harding desired him to outstay the colonel, and was content with the little grateful glance she cast at him when Morales went away. Ten minutes later Appleby also rose, but the banker detained him a minute or two.
“You have a consignment of sugar to be shipped,” he said “Some one will go down to the port. Yourself, I think?”