In that flash all of our comradeship returned, bringing with it something new, which I dared not think was intimacy.
Yet constraint fell away like a curtain between us, and though she dominated, and I was afraid lest I overstep limits which I myself had set, the charm of her careless confidence, her pretty, undissembled caprices, her pleasure in a delicately intimate badinage, gave me something of a self-reliance, a freedom that I had not known in a woman’s presence for many years.
“We brought you here because we thought it was good for you,” she said, reverting maliciously to the theme that had at first embarrassed her. “We were perfectly certain that you have always been unfit to take care of yourself. Now we have the proofs.”
“Mademoiselle Elven said that you harbored us only because you were afraid of those bandits who have arrived in Paradise,” I observed. 325
“Afraid!” she said, scornfully. “Oh, you are making fun of me now. Indeed, when Mr. Buckhurst came last night I had my men conduct him to the outer gate!”
“Did he come last night?” I asked, troubled.
“Yes.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders.
“Alone?”
“That unspeakable creature, Mornac, was with him. I had no idea he was here; had you?”
I was silent. Did Mornac mean trouble for me? Yet how could he, shorn now of all authority?