There was no answer. The woman drew back. She would have closed the door, but a slim, active figure sprang across the threshold. She shrieked in terror. The new-comer was a Brazilian officer, one of those glittering beings whom she had seen lounging outside the Prindio[1] during her rare visits to the town. She was hoping to greet her Manoel, she half expected to find Marcel, but to be faced by an officer was the last thing she had thought of. In abject fear, she broke into a wild appeal to the Virgin; the officer merely laughed, though not loudly.
"Be not afraid, senhora—I am a friend," he said with quiet confidence, and the fact that he addressed her so courteously was a wondrously soothing thing in itself. But he raised a fresh wave of dread in her soul when he peered into the cabin and spoke words she did not understand.
"I think you are here, mademoiselle," he said in French. "I am come to share your retreat for a little while. Perchance by daybreak I may arrive at some plan. At present, you and I are in difficulties, is it not?"
Iris recognized the voluble, jerky speech. A wild foreboding gripped her heart until she was like to shudder under its fierce anguish.
"You, Captain San Benavides?" she asked, and her utterance was unnaturally calm.
"I, mademoiselle," he said, "and, alas! I am alone. May I come in? It is not well to show a light at this hour, seeing that the island is overrun with infuriated soldiers."
The concluding sentence was addressed to Luisa Gomez in Portuguese. Realizing instinctively that the man came as a friend, she stood aside, trembling, on the verge of tears. He entered, and the door was closed behind him. The yellow gleam of the lamp fell on his smart uniform, and gilded the steel scabbard of his sword. In that dim interior the signs of his three days' sojourn on Grand-père were not in evidence, and he had not been harmed during the struggle on the main road or in the rush for the launch.
He doffed his rakish-looking kepi and bowed low before Iris. Perhaps the white misery in her face touched him more deeply than he had counted on. Be that as it may, a note of genuine sympathy vibrated in his voice as he said:
"I am the only man who escaped, mademoiselle. The others? Well, it is war, and war is a lottery."
"Do you mean that they have been killed, all killed?" she murmured with a pitiful sob.