Yet one thing she had kept to herself, and for a moment she felt the urge to go back and confide in the iron-willed Scotchman her own personal fear of Aleck Curry. Never until this night had she been afraid of him. She had defied and hated him as a young girl, and as she grew older had loathed and repulsed him for the persistence of his passion. To fear him had never entered her head, even in the days when once or twice she had used her hands in defending herself against, his unwelcome attentions.
But now she knew that Aleck's hour had come. Even though he was temporarily a prisoner on the island, he held her happiness and Peter's fate in the hollow of his hand. That fact, its significance, its terrible import for her, she had seen in Aleck's exultant face and eyes at the pool. In that hour his joy and triumph was not that he had run down Peter's father, but that she at last had come within the reach of his desires. And the fight had added to his mastery, for it had outlawed Peter and had given to the man she hated the final power to wreck her world. And she, of all that world, was the only one who knew what Aleck's price for the freedom of those she loved would be.
The thought was a monstrous thing in her brain. She had fought it, had beaten it back with the strength of her will, and she struggled with it again as she turned away from the light in Simon's window. Her hands clenched and a bit of savagery leaped through her blood as she went again through the moonlight. She had seen the deadly fire in the Scotchman's eyes, and that fire was now in her own. Over and over she told herself that she was still unafraid of Aleck Curry. Her lips whispered the words. But in her heart, fixed and implacable, remained the fear.
She had almost reached the shadow of Pierre Gourdon's cabin when a figure stepped out to meet her. It was Peter. His startled face questioned her in the moonlight.
"I thought you were asleep," he said in a low voice. "And so—I was passing under your window. I wanted to be near you for a few moments."
He put his arms about her and looked anxiously into her face, and then he laid his lips against her soft hair.
"It was impossible." She shivered against him. "I undressed, as you told me to do, and I went to bed. But I had to get up. I kept thinking, thinking—until I felt like screaming, or jumping out of my window and running to you."
"You are a little frightened, Ange—after what happened at the pool. But it will all come out right. Aleck is safe. He can't harm us——"
She looked up quickly, and saw in his eyes the same look that had been in Simon's. Her arms tightened about him.
"Peter, you don't need to hide anything from me," she protested. "We're both thinking the same thing—afraid of the same thing. It's Aleck Curry—and what he will do when he gets off the island. We can keep him there until your father is well, and safe. But after that—what will happen to you?"