Her sparkling eye and her grave smile disarmed me instantly. I felt suddenly conscious I was not playing a very judicious part, or showing myself perhaps to great advantage. So I bade them both good-night and returned to my room.
But it was not to go to bed. For two mortal hours I paced my floor, and thought and thought, but not about any problem of the war. I kept hearing Tiel's "Well," spoken in that hatefully intimate way, and then remembering that those two were alone—all night!—in the front part of the house, far out of sound or reach of me. I did not doubt Eileen for an instant, but that calm, cool, cosmopolitan adventurer, who could knock an unsuspecting clergyman on the head and throw him over a cliff, and then tell the story with a smile,—what was he not capable of?
Again and again I asked myself why it concerned me. This was a girl I had only known for hours. But her smile was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep at length about three o'clock in the morning.
VIII.
THE DECISION.
In the morning I came down to breakfast without asking anybody's leave, and I looked at those two very hard. To see Eileen fresh and calm and smiling gave me the most intense relief, while, as for Tiel, he looked as cool and imperturbable as he always did—and I cannot put it stronger than that, for nothing more cool and imperturbable than Tiel ever breathed. In fact it could not have breathed, for it would have had to be a graven image.
He looked at me critically, but all he said was—
"If it wasn't too wet for your nice uniform, Belke, we might have had breakfast on the lawn."
"You are afraid some one may come and look in at this window?" I asked.