Superb in her icy quietude—the quietude of despair—and without a falter in her voice, she said: ‘Colonel Woodruffe, my husband, Hector Laroche, ex-convict, number 897.’
The fellow fell back a step in sheer amazement. ‘How!’ he gasped. ‘You have told him’——
‘Everything.’
She sat down again on the seat from which she had just risen, and grasping the fingers of one hand tightly with those of the other, turned her face in the direction of the waterfall.
Laroche’s sang-froid had only deserted him for an instant. ‘Quelle bêtise!’ he muttered with a shrug. Then becoming aware that the colonel’s cold, haughty stare was fixed full upon him, he retorted with a look that was a mixture of triumph and tigerish ferocity. Turning to his wife, and all but touching her shoulder with his lean claw-like finger, he said with a sneer that was half a snarl: ‘My property, monsieur—my property!’
Suddenly there came a sound of voices, of laughter, of singing. A troop of noisy excursionists had invaded the glen.
Mr Santelle had apparently seen as much as he cared to see. He let the parted branches fall gently together again, and went smilingly on his way.
CHAPTER X.
It was the forenoon of the second day after the picnic. There was thunder in the air, but the storm had not yet broken. Any moment the clouds might part and the first bolt fall. What might have been the result of the collision between Laroche and Colonel Woodruffe on the day of the picnic, but for the opportune invasion of the glen by a number of excursionists, who put privacy to flight, it is of course impossible to say. It may be also that the Frenchman read something in the colonel’s eye which warned him not to proceed too far. No sooner, therefore, had the remark last recorded passed his lips, than he turned abruptly on his heel, and striking into the same winding pathway that Mora had taken earlier in the day, became at once lost to view in the depths of the shrubbery.
‘Had you not better let me take you back to the hotel at once?’ said the colonel to Mora after a little pause. ‘You can easily make an excuse to your party for leaving them. There is an inn at the foot of the valley at which we can hire a fly.’