"Didn't you?"
"I was not there," she answered; "I was nursing a sick woman in the plantation."
"Oh! You didn't pass your evening on the balcony, then, as you have sometimes done?"
"No," she said, and still her eyes gazed so intently into his that he wondered what was going on in her mind.
"No." Then, suddenly, she asked, "When are you going away?"
"That is not polite, Zara. One never asks a guest----"
"Why," she interrupted, speaking almost savagely and showing her small white teeth, as though with an access of sudden temper--"why do you turn everything into a--a--chanza--a joke. Are you a fo--a madman?"
"Really, Zara!" Then, seeing that the girl was contending with some inward turbulence of spirit which seemed almost likely to end in an outbreak, Julian said quietly, seriously, "No, Zara, I am neither a fool nor a madman. Look here, I believe you are a good, honest, straightforward girl. Therefore, I will be plain with you. I have told Mr. Ritherdon that I am going on Monday. In four days----"
"Go at once!" she interrupted again. "At once. Get news from Belize, somehow, that calls you away. Leave Desolada. Begone!" she continued in her quaint, stilted English, which she spoke well enough except when obliged to use either a Spanish or Carib word. "Begone!" And as she said this it seemed almost to Julian that, with those dark gleaming eyes of hers, she was endeavouring to convey some intelligence to him which she would not put into words.
"That," he said, referring to her last sentence, "is what I am thinking about doing. Only, even then, I shall not have done with Desolada and its inhabitants. There is more for me to do yet, Zara."