"Yes, yes," she said. "I know that we have not. Yet--yet--this is the very spot--the very place. That makes it all so much more horrible, so much more ghostly. And to-night, I know not why, I feel as I have never felt before, nervous, frightened, alarmed, as though at some danger near at hand. Let me light the lamp ere you continue."
"It is the storm has made you nervous," he replied, trying to soothe her while he assisted her to arrange the lamp. "The air, too, is charged with electricity--that alone will unstring your nerves, to say nothing of the darkness and the noise of the tempest. I have done wrong, Barbara; I have selected the worst time for reading this horrible story to you. I should have chosen one of the bright days when we could sit on the crags and have nothing but the brilliant sun about and over us."
She glanced up at him with a smile in her clear eyes--the smile that never failed to make him think that he had lit on some woman belonging to another world than his, it was so full of innocence as well as a simple trust that would have well befitted a little child--and laid her hand upon his arm as though to assure him that he had done nothing to affright her. But, as she did so, there came a terrific flash of lightning which illuminated all the tropical wood outside--as they could see through the slats of the jalousie--and then a roar of thunder that made the girl scream and let fall the lamp just lighted.
But Reginald caught it deftly, and placing it on the table said with a smile--
"It would never do for another lamp to be overturned here as one was so long ago. Come, Barbara, cheer up, take heart! We will read no more to-night."
"Yes, yes," she exclaimed. "Read. Go on reading and finish your story. Besides, we must do something to pass the night--you cannot go to your yacht, and I--I--; for the first time in my life I fear to be alone. I dread, though I know not what. I have been alone night after night here for even weeks and months together, and never feared anything. Yet, now, I am afraid. Pray, do not leave me to-night."
He looked at her, admiring, almost worshipping her for the innocence she showed in every word she spoke, and then he said--
"Have no fear, I will not leave you if you wish it. But, Barbara, we must do something else to pass the hours away than read old Nicholas's story. What shall we do? Let us have a game of cards."
There were some packs in her house that they had played with before now--cards brought from other islands by her dissolute brother, with which to pass the long nights in, as she frankly owned, trying to get the better of his father; but she would not play now.
"No," she said. "Let us come to the end of the tale. I cannot rest until I have heard it all. Do, do finish it."