"I'd have twisted his neck clean off," I answered savagely, "If I'd known then what I know now!"
"I thought you were going to kill him," said the girl. "You must have a very bad temper, Major Okewood," she added sedately.
After what I had already gone through that day, it galled me to think of the two of us chatting away as inconsequently as though we were on the lawns at Ascot. No man, I grant you, could have had a more charming companion than Marjorie Garth and she was as pretty as a picture in the plain tussore riding costume she wore with a rakish little brown felt hat.
But I was in no mood for badinage. I was haunted by the imminent peril of our position and weighed down by my responsibility for the safety of this girl. So bluntly, for my nerves were on edge and every flowering bush seemed to conceal an enemy, I told her how things stood. She listened very quietly but when I had finished I noticed that her little air of raillery had gone.
"If you only knew," I concluded, "how bitterly I reproach myself for bringing you into this...."
"When you came on board the Naomi," Marjorie said gently, "you could not tell that you would be followed to the island."
"That," I rejoined rather forlornly, "is my only excuse."
We halted in the woods on coming in sight of the sea. The beach was deserted, as we had left it, with the sea-birds wheeling ceaselessly over the bay and the tide lapping gently on the white sand.
The light was mellowing. My watch showed it to be five o'clock.
"We shall have to hurry," I warned, "for we must be in our new retreat before it is dark."