The morning seemed to inspire adventure, and the little tale that Evelyn was telling was just what was required to enhance its suggestion.  By some accident in the conversation she had been led to speak of how she had been nearly captured by pirates in the Mediterranean.  They were becalmed off the African coast, and a boat had rowed out with fruits and vegetables.  The suspicious countenances of this boat’s crew did not strike them at the time.  But they were a reconnoitring party, and next day about four in the afternoon they noticed a vessel propelled by sails and oars steering straight for them, as if in the intention of running them down.  It paid no attention to the cries of the captain, but came straight at them, and would have succeeded in its design if the yacht had not been going through the water faster than the pirates supposed, so they fell astern, and no one thought any more of them till they tacked, and they had almost overtaken the yacht, they were hardly distant more than fifty yards, when their intention was suspected.  The captain put the Medusa’s head up to the wind, and she soon began to leave her pursuer behind.

“We had no arms on board, they were fifty to twenty; the men would have been massacred, and I should have finished my days in a harem.”

Ulick had brought his violin with him, and they walked under the drooping boughs, she singing and he playing old-world melodies by Lulli and Rameau.  Sometimes a passer-by stopped, and peering through, discovered them in a hollow sitting under an oak.  A snake crawled out of its hole, and Ulick was about to rush forward to kill it, but Evelyn laid her hand upon his, and said—­

“Let it listen, poor thing.  No living thing should meet its death for its love of music.”

“You’re no longer the Evelyn Innes that loved Owen Asher.”

“I think I have changed a great deal.  I was very young when I knew him first.”

She spoke of the influence he had exercised over her, but now his ideas meant as little as he did himself—­it was all far away.  Only a little trick of speech and a turn of phrase remained to recall his passage through her life.  When they returned home she found a letter from him on the table, and her face clouded as she read his letter, for it announced an intention to call when he came to town, and to avoid his visit she thought she would stop in Dulwich.  But if she stayed over Saturday, she would have to go to Mass on Sunday.  Last Sunday she escaped by pleading indisposition.  She wondered which she would prefer, to face Owen or to brave the effect that she knew Mass would produce upon her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX