I saw an odd startled look come over Nan’s face, and she looked at him closely, and repeated his name, as if she were puzzled. “Mr. Tempest?”
“Reginald Tempest—at your service,” said he, with a kind of leer that made me inclined to strike him.
They began to talk, and at every word, the man said, I saw the mystified look deepening in Nan’s face. She seemed glad when she spied Nick—away down the course—and proposed to me that we should walk and find him.
Before she went, however, Tempest had got her promise to dance several dances with him at the ball that evening.
Nan was greatly agitated. “Mr. Curran,” she said as we walked along, “that man’s name isn’t Tempest. I wish you’d try and find out something about him; he is either the brother of a man I knew long ago—the man who got Nick into terrible trouble—or he is the man himself, and his name is Rummles. But he has grown a beard and moustache since then, and is changed in every way, and I can’t be sure.
“Oh, if I knew!” she went on, excitedly. “He, and he only, can clear Nick, and give him the right to go about the world without a stain.
“Mr. Curran, if there’s any spark of good feeling in him, he’d do it now—now, after Nick and I have suffered so. And now that Nick is rich and has a career before him, and wants so to do good—we’d pay him, Mr. Curran.
“I’d promise for Nick the half of his fortune—you know about the big nugget—and Nick wants me to marry him at once, and to get away from this dreadful place, and start a fresh life in England. But what’s the good of his trying, with that stain always on him? Oh, I feel that I’d almost sell my soul to clear him.”
She told me that was the reason she had promised the dances to Tempest. She wanted to find out if he was really Rummles. She said he had been fond of her once, and perhaps he would tell her the truth now.
Remembering a look in the man’s eyes, when they had rested on Nan, I told her it was a dangerous game, and that she had best not encourage this Tempest, or Rummles, whichever he might be. But she shook her head, and her eyes had that shining look, which Nan’s eyes always took, when she was determined.