Yet had he no boyish vision of quick promotion in the lady’s heart, no primitive desire to show his mettle out of hand, to set her trembling while he did or died?  He had, I thought, and he had not; that shining face could only have reflected a single and candid heart.  But it is these very natures, so simple and sweet-hearted and transparent, that are least to be trusted on the subject of their own motives and emotions, for they are the soonest deceived, not only by others but in themselves.  Or so I venture to think, and even then reflected, as I shook my dear lad’s hand by the side parapet of the moonlit terrace, and watched him run down into the shadows of the fir-trees and so out of my sight with two dark and stalwart figures that promptly detached themselves from the shadows of the shoemaker’s hut.  A third figure mounted to where I now sat listening to the easy, swinging, confident steps, as they fell fainter and fainter upon the ear; it was the shoemaker himself who had shod my two sticks with spikes and my boots with formidable nails; and we exchanged a few words in a mixture of languages which I should be very sorry to reproduce.

“Do you know those two guides?” is what I first asked in effect.

“Very well, monsieur.”

“Are they good guides?”

“The very best, monsieur.”

CHAPTER X

THE LAST WORD

“Is that you?”

It was an hour or so later, but still I sat ruminating upon the parapet, within a yard or two of the spot where I had first accosted Bob Evers and Mrs. Lascelles.  I had retraced the little sequence of subsequent events, paltry enough in themselves, yet of a certain symmetry and some importance as a whole.  I had attacked and defended my own conduct down to that hour, when I ought to have been formulating its logical conclusion, and during my unprofitable deliberations the night had aged and altered (as it were) behind my back.  There was no more music in the drawing-room.  There were no more people under the drawing-room windows.  The lights in all the lower windows were not what they had been; it was the bedroom tiers that were illuminated now.  But I did not realise that there was less light outside until I awoke to the fact that Mrs. Lascelles was peering tentatively toward me, and putting her question in such an uncertain tone.

“That depends who I am supposed to be,” I answered, laughing as I rose to put my personality beyond doubt.

“How stupid of me!” laughed Mrs. Lascelles in her turn, though rather nervously to my fancy.  “I thought it was Mr. Evers!”

I had hard work to suppress an exclamation.  So he had not told her what he was going to do, and yet he had not forbidden me to tell her.  Poor Bob was more subtle than I had supposed, but it was a simple subtlety, a strange chord but still in key with his character as I knew it.

“I am sorry to disappoint you,” said I.  “But I am afraid you won’t see any more of Bob Evers to-night.”