“In the Sphinx, you mean,” she suggested.
“Yes, miss, jes’ what I said, wasn’t it?” agreed Maria. “You can see ‘em all on board this morning—busy as bees in a hive.”
Ann stepped out of bed and went to the window. It was quite true. Far below in the bay she could see the shining Sphinx, and there were signs of unmistakable activity on board. She drew a long breath. If Brett were going, it was good news—not bad! She had always been secretly afraid of him. Now—now that she was aware of the part he had played in the destruction of her happiness, she knew that she would never again be able to see him without recalling all that she had lost. He seemed to her to embody the whole tragedy which had befallen her.
And the yacht—his yacht—waiting, waiting always in the bay, like a cat at a mousehole....
Two hours later Ann stood on the cliff and watched the Sphinx steam slowly out to sea, and with the last gleam of the yacht’s white stern it seemed to her as though some inexplicable, still lingering menace were removed.
CHAPTER XXVII THE TRUTH
“Café noir? Bien, m’sieu.”
The alert French waiter shot away like a stone from a catapult, leaving Coventry to lapse back into the reverie from which he had roused himself to order his coffee. He had dined rather early with a view to escaping the chattering crowd which thronged the hotel, and now he was sitting alone in a windowed corner of the salle, his eyes resting absently on the curving line of coast and sea.