“We are going back by Suez,” he began almost boisterously.  “I have been looking up the sailing lists.  If the zephirs of your Pacific are only moderately propitious I think we are sure to catch the mail boat due in Marseilles on the 18th of March.  This will suit me excellently. . . .”  He lowered his tone.  “My dear young friend, I’m deeply grateful to you.”

Renouard’s set lips moved.

“Why are you grateful to me?”

“Ah!  Why?  In the first place you might have made us miss the next boat, mightn’t you? . . .  I don’t thank you for your hospitality.  You can’t be angry with me for saying that I am truly thankful to escape from it.  But I am grateful to you for what you have done, and—­for being what you are.”

It was difficult to define the flavour of that speech, but Renouard received it with an austerely equivocal smile.  The professor stepping into the boat opened his parasol and sat down in the stern-sheets waiting for the ladies.  No sound of human voice broke the fresh silence of the morning while they walked the broad path, Miss Moorsom a little in advance of her aunt.

When she came abreast of him Renouard raised his head.

“Good-bye, Mr. Renouard,” she said in a low voice, meaning to pass on; but there was such a look of entreaty in the blue gleam of his sunken eyes that after an imperceptible hesitation she laid her hand, which was ungloved, in his extended palm.

“Will you condescend to remember me?” he asked, while an emotion with which she was angry made her pale cheeks flush and her black eyes sparkle.

“This is a strange request for you to make,” she said exaggerating the coldness of her tone.

“Is it?  Impudent perhaps.  Yet I am not so guilty as you think; and bear in mind that to me you can never make reparation.”

“Reparation?  To you!  It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings—­and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride.  No!  I don’t want to remember you.”

Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and looking into her eyes with fearless despair —

“You’ll have to.  I shall haunt you,” he said firmly.

Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it.  Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.

The professor gave her a sidelong look—­nothing more.  But the professor’s sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look at the scene.  She dropped it with a faint rattle.

“I’ve never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady,” she murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head.  When, a moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the bungalow.  She watched him go in—­amazed—­before she too left the soil of Malata.