I put my hand over both of hers, clasped in her lap.  “I know,” I acknowledged repentantly, “and—­people do queer things when it is moonlight.  The moon has got me to-night, Alison.  If I am a boor, remember that, won’t you?”

Her fingers lay quiet under mine.  “And so,” she went on with a little sigh, “I began to think perhaps I cared.  But all the time I felt that there was something not quite right.  Now and then Mrs. Curtis would say or do something that gave me a queer start, as if she had dropped a mask for a moment.  And there was trouble with the servants; they were almost insolent.  I couldn’t understand.  I don’t know when it dawned on me that the old Baron Cavalcanti had been right when he said they were not my kind of people.  But I wanted to get away, wanted it desperately.”

“Of course, they were not your kind,” I cried.  “The man was married!  The girl Jennie, a housemaid, was a spy in Mrs. Sullivan’s employ.  If he had pretended to marry you I would have killed him!  Not only that, but the man he murdered, Harrington, was his wife’s father.  And I’ll see him hang by the neck yet if it takes every energy and every penny I possess.”

I could have told her so much more gently, have broken the shock for her; I have never been proud of that evening on the sand.  I was alternately a boor and a ruffian—­like a hurt youngster who passes the blow that has hurt him on to his playmate, that both may bawl together.  And now Alison sat, white and cold, without speech.

“Married!” she said finally, in a small voice.  “Why, I don’t think it is possible, is it?  I—­I was on my way to Baltimore to marry him myself, when the wreck came.”

“But you said you didn’t care for him!” I protested, my heavy masculine mind unable to jump the gaps in her story.  And then, without the slightest warning, I realized that she was crying.  She shook off my hand and fumbled for her handkerchief, and failing to find it, she accepted the one I thrust into her wet fingers.

Then, little by little, she told me from the handkerchief, a sordid story of a motor trip in the mountains without Mrs. Curtis, of a lost road and a broken car, and a rainy night when they—­she and Sullivan, tramped eternally and did not get home.  And of Mrs. Curtis, when they got home at dawn, suddenly grown conventional and deeply shocked.  Of her own proud, half-disdainful consent to make possible the hackneyed compromising situation by marrying the rascal, and then—­of his disappearance from the train.  It was so terrible to her, such a Heaven-sent relief to me, in spite of my rage against Sullivan, that I laughed aloud.  At which she looked at me over the handkerchief.

“I know it’s funny,” she said, with a catch in her breath.  “When I think that I nearly married a murderer—­and didn’t—­I cry for sheer joy.”  Then she buried her face and cried again.

“Please don’t,” I protested unsteadily.  “I won’t be responsible if you keep on crying like that.  I may forget that I have a capital charge hanging over my head, and that I may be arrested at any moment.”