And so they walked slowly up and down the moss-grown terrace--alone in this wonderful tropic night--while he told her the little tragedy of his life. He told the story simply, with characteristic gaps in the sequence, which she was left to fill up from her imagination.
“I shall not like Mrs. Harrington,” said Eve, when the story was told. “I am glad that she cannot come much into my life. My father wanted me to go and stay with her last summer, but I would not leave him alone, and for some reason he would not accept the invitation for himself. Do you know, Fitz, I sometimes think there is a past--some mysterious past--which contained my father and Mrs. Harrington and a man--the Count de Lloseta.”
“I have seen him,” put in Fitz, “at Mrs. Harrington’s often.”
The girl nodded her head with a quaint little assumption of shrewdness and deep suspicion.
“My father admired him--I do not know why. And pitied him intensely--I do not know why.”
“He was always very nice to me,” answered Fitz, “but I never understood him.”
Talking thus they forgot the flight of time. It sometimes happens thus in youth. And the huge clock in the stable yard striking ten aroused Eve suddenly to the lateness of the hour.
“I must go,” she said. “I am glad you told me about--Luke. I feel as if I knew you better and understood - a little more. Good-night.”
She left him on the terrace, and walked sorrowfully away to the house which could never be the same again.
Fitz watched her slight young form disappear through an open doorway, and then he became lost in the contemplation of the distant sea, lying still and glass-like in the moonlight. He was looking to the north, and it happened that from that same point of the compass there was coming towards him the good steamer Bellver, on whose deck stood a little shock-headed man--Captain Bontnor.