Peggy’s air and dignified speech so reminded the girls of the suave Mr. Ives that both of them smiled broadly. The words were brutally frank, but Peggy’s tone robbed them of sharpness. Now she was the cold Count in her recital. The girls could fairly see him draw himself up in courteous resentment.
“‘You do not mince words, I see. It was the only way to produce the effect through you. If you believed it yourself, you could intimidate them.’”
“‘But they were not intimidated. I do not like this intimacy with my daughter any more than you do. But the first object must be to avoid suspicion. I would suggest that we employ’—then I missed a few words just at the important place! Dad dropped his voice a little, and you know how the surf roars sometimes. But I got one clue or one thing that might be as important. The Count started in to talk. ‘See to it,’ he said, ‘that they’—then a mumble of words—‘by the twenty-eighth.’
“I said it over to myself, so I wouldn’t forget to tell you girls exactly what had been said, and then I realized that Dad was coming up the steps. They shook, as you remember they do a little when somebody walks. It was too far to get to the top before he reached me, so what did I do but whisk out to the side and drop under the steps to wait till he passed!”
“But it is some distance, in places, to the rocks underneath!”
Peggy nodded. “I knew it, but it was ‘instinctive,’ as you say, Leslie, to get out of Dad’s way, and by good luck a nice rock was reachable under my step. I just scrooched there again till Dad went by and I’m sure he never saw me. I waited, because I thought the Count might come next, but he never did, and I was so curious that when I hitched up again—you ought to have seen my acrobatic performance, girls,—I sneaked down the steps to the bottom and finally all around the place and never a sign did I see of the Count. There wasn’t a sign of a boat, either, and there had scarcely been time, I think, for a boat to get around behind the channel entrance.”
“I don’t know,” Leslie said. “You may have taken more time than you thought.”
“Perhaps so, but wouldn’t I have heard a boat?”
“A launch certainly, but not a row boat against the sound of the surf if it was rather rough that night.”
“Perhaps the Count was behind a tree,” Sarita suggested.