“No!” She dropped the arm that she had clung to. And at the word or the movement, Miles understood, with a strange triumph, his late repulse from Alward’s Cove. “No, there’s nothing. But there’s one thing, Captain Florio. This man’s real, and I believe him clear through. And the way I believe you is just skin-deep, and the rest all hollow!”
Tony made a little plausible gesture of submission, as foreign as it was graceful.
“Short and sweet, that is,” he answered. “Not true, all the same. I’m honest my own way, if I don’t parade it like a God’s miracle. I meant all I said, Anna; it’s a pity you can’t take it so.”
He turned away, a jaunty penitent, swung his wide shoulders edgewise into the gap, and disappeared among the firs. The whisking of the boughs died into silence; and next moment the girl’s courage had fallen slack.
“Oh, what shall I do?” she whispered, as if alone. Her face she held averted; but Miles could see her head shaken like a daffodil on the stalk, and feel the hand tremble which had caught his arm again. “Where can I go? And it’s in the same house with me—They’re always there.”
“Anna,” he ventured; and as her hand dropped suddenly, “Haven’t I as good a right to call you so? Come, we’re old friends. Tell us.”
She would not turn.
“It’s—oh, it’s nothing!”
“If it should be anything?” he persisted. “If you—won’t you come tell me then?”
She looked up and away in a flash; but he had caught the lustre of brimming eyes.