“I should say not,” said Shirley unresponsively. “I am quite as sure that he was not the false baron as I am that you were not.”
Armitage laughed.
“That is a little pointed.”
“It was meant to be,” said Shirley sternly. “It is”—she weighed the word—“ridiculous that both of you should be here.”
“Thank you, for my half! I didn’t know he was here! But I am not exactly here—I have a much, safer place,”—he swept the blue-hilled horizon with his hand. “Monsieur Chauvenet and I will not shoot at each other in the hotel dining-room. But I am really relieved that he has come. We have an interesting fashion of running into each other; it would positively grieve me to be obliged to wait long for him.”
He smiled and thrust his hat under his arm. The sun was dropping behind the great western barricade, and a chill wind crept sharply over the valley.
He started to walk beside her as she turned away, but she paused abruptly.
“Oh, this won’t do at all! I can’t be seen with you, even in the shadow of my own house. I must trouble you to take the side gate,”—and she indicated it by a nod of her head.
“Not if I know myself! I am not a fraudulent member of the German nobility—you have told me so yourself. Your conscience is clear—I assure you mine is equally so! And I am not a person, Miss Claiborne, to sneak out by side gates—particularly when I came over the fence! It’s a long way around anyhow—and I have a horse over there somewhere by the inn.”
“My brother—”