He was looking straight into the girl's handsome face, his heart torn between love and suspicion.
Those days at Biarritz recurred to him; how he would watch for her and go and meet her down towards Grande Plage, till, by degrees, it had become to both the most natural thing in the world. On those rare evenings when they did not meet the girl was conscious of a little feeling of disappointment which she was too shy to own, even to her own heart.
Walter Fetherston owned it freely enough. In that bright springtime the day was incomplete unless he saw her; and he knew that, even now, every hour was making her grow dearer to him. From that chance meeting at the hotel their friendship had grown, and had ripened into something warmer, dearer—a secret held closely in each heart, but none the less sweet for that.
After leaving Biarritz the man had torn himself from her—why, he hardly knew. Only he felt upon him some fatal fascination, strong and irresistible. It was the first time in his life that he had been what is vulgarly known as "over head and ears in love."
He returned to England, and then, a month later, his investigation of Henry Bellairs' death, for the purpose of obtaining a plot for a new novel he contemplated, revealed to him a staggering and astounding truth.
Even then, in face of that secret knowledge he had gained, he had been powerless, and he had gone up to Monifieth deliberately again to meet her—to be drawn again beneath the spell of those wonderful eyes.
There was love in the man's heart. But sometimes it embittered him. It did at that moment, as they strolled still onward over that carpet of moss and fallen leaves. He had loved her, as he believed her to be a woman with heart and soul too pure to harbour an evil thought. But her story of the death of poor Bellairs, the man who had loved her, had convinced him that his suspicions were, alas! only too well grounded.
