"You are very good, and, of course, I shall be delighted to come back and stay with you. As to the date, well! Mr. and Miss Spranger are so kind and hospitable that you must let me avail myself of their welcome for a little longer. I suppose a day need not be actually fixed just now?"
"Why, no, my dear fellow," Sebastian exclaimed, with that almost boisterous cordiality which he had unfailingly evinced since they had first met, and which might be either real or assumed. "Why, no, of course not. Indeed, there is no need to fix any date at all. There is the house and everything in it, and there am I. Come when you like and you will find a welcome, rough as it must needs be in this country, but at any rate sincere."
After which there was nothing more for Julian to do than to mutter courteous thanks for such proffered hospitality and to promise that, ere long, he would again become a guest at Desolada.
They walked with Sebastian now to the stable, where his horse was awaiting him, Beatrix proffering refreshment--to omit which courtesy to a visitor would have been contrary to all the established, though unwritten, laws of Honduras, as well as, one may say, of most colonies--but Sebastian, refusing this, rode off to Belize, where he said he had business. And Julian could not help wondering to himself if that business could possibly have any connection with the same affairs which had brought him out from England.
"You either didn't see my signals, or misunderstood them," Beatrix said, as now they returned once more to the coolness of the garden.
"Pardon me," Julian replied, "I did. Only, it is necessary--absolutely necessary, I think--that I should pay another visit to my cousin's house. To-night your father and I are going to invite your opinion on a matter between Sebastian and me. Then I think you will also agree that it is necessary for me to return to Desolada."
"I may do so," Beatrix said, "but all the same I don't like the idea of your being an inhabitant of that place--of your being under his roof again."
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE REMINISCENCES OF A FRENCH GENTLEMAN
A week later Julian was once more on his way towards Desolada, and upon a journey which he was fully determined should either result in satisfying him that Sebastian did not properly occupy the position which he now held openly in the eyes of the whole colony, or should be his last one.