Trembling violently she turned to Philip.

“Philip!” she cried.  “What is it?” As her eyes met his, her hand went to her heart and the color swept in brilliant tide from the slim brown throat to the questioning eyes.  “Oh, Philip!  Philip!” She choked and fell again to trembling.  It was a cry of remorse and heart-broken apology for the memory of a moon above the marsh.

For somehow in that instant, by a freak of instinct, the rain and the wind of Okeechobee and the bird in the pines came into their own.  Their subtle messages dovetailed with the hurt look in Philip’s eyes—­with the conviction of the girl’s sore heart, unconquerable for all she had desperately fought it—­with the revelation of treachery which lay now at the bottom of the lake.

Philip was very white.

“But,” he said gently, “you could not know.”

“I could have waited and trusted,” cried the girl.  “I could have remembered Arcadia!”

Was Ronador forgotten?  Tregar thought so.  These two mutely avowing with blazing eyes their utter trust and loyalty had for the moment forgotten everything but each other.

Ronador stalked viciously away to the lake, restlessly turned on his heel with a curse and came slowly back.  There was despair in his eyes.  Tregar thought of the black moments of impulse and the tearing conscience and pitied him profoundly.

“Excellency,” reminded Diane, “there is an explanation—­”

But Ronador’s pallid lips were set in lines of fierce denial.

“Philip!” appealed the girl.

“Well,” said Philip looking away, “it’s a tale of a candlestick.”

“A candlestick!”

“And a hidden paper.”

“Yes?”

Ronador seemed about to speak, thought better of it and closed his lips in a tense white line of sullenness.

Philip glanced keenly at him, and his own mouth grew a little sterner.

“Excellency,” he said to Ronador, “that you may not feel impelled again to violence in the suppression of this curious fragment of family history, let me warn you that the story has been entrusted in full to Father Joda, who knew and loved your cousin.  Any spectacular irrationality that you may hereafter develop in connection with Miss Westfall, will lead to its disclosure.  He is pledged to that in writing.”

The color died out of Ronador’s face.  The fire, roused by the specter he had fought this many a day, burned itself quite to ashes and left him cold and sullen.  He had played and lost.  And he was an older and quieter man for the losing.  Whatever else lay at the bottom of his contradictory maze of dark moods and passions, he had courage and the curse of conscience.  There were black memories struggling now within him.

Tregar moved quietly to Ronador’s side, an act of ready loyalty not without dignity in the eyes of Philip.

“Your letter hinted something of all this,” he said.  “Let us be quite fair, Poynter.  Ronador feared only for his little son.”