“Where did he telephone from?”
“From his room in the Palace.”
“I thought he had given up his room?”
“He had. But—somebody telephoned to the telegraph office from somewhere in the hotel and got Mr. Makers’ wire. You can get pretty much everything except a moderate bill out of a hotel.”
“I see,” said the colonel and immediately in his heart compared himself to the immortal “blind man;” for his wits appeared to him to be tramping round futilely in a maze; no nearer the exit than when the tramp began.
That night, after Warnebold had departed, leaving most effusive thanks and expressions of confidence, Winter was standing at his window absently looking at the garden faintly colored by the moonlight, while his mind was plying back and forth between half a dozen contradictions.
He went over the night of the attack on Keatcham; he summoned every look, every motion of Janet Smith; in one phase of feeling he cudgeled himself for a wooden fool who had been absolutely brutal to a defenseless woman who trusted him; he hated himself for the way he would not see her when she looked toward him; no wonder at last she stiffened, and now she absolutely avoided him! But, in a swift revulsion against his own softness he was instantly laying on the blows as lustily because of his incredible, pig-headed credulity. How absolutely simple the thing was! She cared for this scoundrel of an Atkins who had first betrayed his employer and then tried to murder him. Very likely they had been half engaged down there in Virginia; and he had crawled out of his engagement; it would be quite like the cur! Later he found that just such a distinguished, charming woman, who had family and friends, was what he wanted; it would be easy enough for him to warm up his old passion, curse him! Then, he had met her and run in a bunch of plausible lies that had convinced her that he had been a regular angel in plain clothes; hadn’t done a thing to Cary or to her. Atkins was such a smooth devil! Winter could just picture him whining to the girl, putting his life in her hands and all that rot; and making all kinds of a tool of her—why, the whole hand was on the board! So she was ready to throw them all overboard to save Atkins from getting his feet wet. That was why she looked so pale and haggard of a morning sometimes, in spite of that ready smile of hers; that was why her eyes were so wistful; she wasn’t a false woman and she sickened of her squalid part. She loved Aunt Rebecca and Archie—all the same, she would turn them both down for him; while as to Rupert Winter, late of the United States army, a worn-out, lame, elderly idiot who had flung away the profession he loved and every chance of a future career in order to have his hands free to keep her out of danger—where were there words blistering enough for such puppy-dog folly! At this point in his jealous imaginings the pain in him goaded him into motion; he began furiously pacing the room, although his lame leg, which he had been using remorselessly all day, was sending jabs and twists of agony through him. But after a little he halted again before the casement window.
The wide, darkening view; the great, silent city with its myriad lights; the shining mist of the bay; the foot-hills with their sheer, straw-colored streaks through the forests and vineyards; the illimitable depths of star-sown, violet sky—all these touched his fevered mood with a sudden calm. His unrest was quieted, as one whose senses are cooled by a running stream.
“You hot-headed Southerner!” he upbraided himself, “don’t get up in the air without any real proof!”
Almost in the flitting of the words through his brain he saw her. The white gown, which was her constant wear in the sick-room, defined her figure clearly against a clump of Japan plum-trees. Their purplish red foliage rustled; and an unseen fountain beyond made a delicate tinkle of water splashing a marble basin. Her face was hidden; only the moonlight gently drew the oval of her cheek. She was standing still, except that one foot was groping back and forth as if trying to find something. But, as he looked, his face growing tender, she knelt on the sod and pulled something out of the ground. This something she seemed to dust off with her handkerchief—he could not see the object, but he could see the flutter of the handkerchief; and when she rose the white linen partly hid the thing in her hand. Only partly, because when she passed around the terrace wall the glow from an electric lantern, in an arch, fell full upon her and burnished a long, thin blade of steel.