“Byron?” wondered Ruth, called perhaps from reveries of her own. “Why?”
“He used to come here to ride,” explained Lucilla, in a breaking voice.
I'm afraid Ruth tittered. Afterwards they were silent again, the silence of the night reasserting itself, and holding them like music, till, by and by, their progress ended at the landing-stage where they had left their gondola.
“But what has become of the wretched thing?” asked Lucilla, looking blankly this way and that. For the solitary gondola tied up there wasn't theirs. She turned vaguely to the men in charge of it, meditating enquiries: when one of them, with the intuition and the aplomb of his race, took the words out of her mouth.
“Pardon, Lordessa,” he said, touching his hat. “If you are seeking the boatmen who brought you here, they went back as soon as they had put you ashore.”
Lucilla eyed him coldly, distrustfully.
“Went back?” she doubted. “But I told them to wait.”
The man shrugged, a shrug of sympathy, of fatalism. “Ech!” he said. “They could not have understood.”
Lucilla frowned, weighing credibilities; then her brow cleared, as in sudden illumination.
“But I did not pay them,” she remembered, and cited the circumstance as conclusive.