His first impulse had been to seek his wife, regardless of discovery or consequences, at Hymettus, where she had said she was going. It was on his way to the rendezvous at Marshall’s claim. But this he as instantly set aside, it was his SON he must find; SHE might not confess, or might deceive him—the boy would not; and if his fears were correct, she could be arraigned afterwards. It was possible for him to reach the little Mission church and school, secluded in a remote valley by the old Franciscan fathers, where he had placed the boy for the last few years unknown to his wife. It would be a long ride, but he could still reach Heavy Tree Hill afterwards before Marshall and the expert arrived. And he had a feeling he had never felt before on the eve of a desperate adventure,—that he must see the boy first. He remembered how the child had often accompanied him in his flight, and how he had gained strength, and, it seemed to him, a kind of luck, from the touch of that small hand in his. Surely it was necessary now that at least his mind should be at rest regarding HIM on the eve of an affair of this moment. Perhaps he might never see him again. At any other time, and under the influence of any other emotion, he would have scorned such a sentimentalism—he who had never troubled himself either with preparation for the future or consideration for the past. But at that moment he felt both. He drew a long breath. He could catch the next train to the Three Boulders and ride thence to San Felipe. He hurriedly left the room, settled with the landlord, and galloped to the station. By the irony of circumstances the only horse available for that purpose was Mr. Hamlin’s own.
By two o’clock he was at the Three Boulders, where he got a fast horse and galloped into San Felipe by four. As he descended the last slope through the fastnesses of pines towards the little valley overlooked in its remoteness and purely pastoral simplicity by the gold-seeking immigrants,—its seclusion as one of the furthest northern Californian missions still preserved through its insignificance and the efforts of the remaining Brotherhood, who used it as an infirmary and a school for the few remaining Spanish families,—he remembered how he once blundered upon it with the boy while hotly pursued by a hue and cry from one of the larger towns, and how he found sanctuary there. He remembered how, when the pursuit was over, he had placed the boy there under the padre’s charge. He had lied to his wife regarding the whereabouts of her son, but he had spoken truly regarding his free expenditure for the boy’s maintenance, and the good fathers had accepted, equally for the child’s sake as for the Church’s sake, the generous “restitution” which this coarse, powerful, ruffianly looking father was apparently seeking to make. He was quite aware of it at the time, and had equally accepted it with grim cynicism; but it now came back to him with a new and smarting significance. Might THEY, too, not succeed in weaning the boy’s affection from him, or if the mother had interfered, would they not side with her in claiming an equal right? He had sometimes laughed to himself over the security of this hiding-place, so unknown and so unlikely to be discovered by her, yet within easy reach of her friends and his enemies; he now ground his teeth over the mistake which his doting desire to keep his son accessible to him had caused him to make. He put spurs to his horse, dashed down the little, narrow, ill-paved street, through the deserted plaza, and pulled up in a cloud of dust before the only remaining tower, with its cracked belfry, of the half-ruined Mission church. A new dormitory and school-building had been extended from its walls, but in a subdued, harmonious, modest way, quite unlike the usual glaring white-pine glories of provincial towns. Steptoe laughed to himself bitterly. Some of his money had gone in it.
He seized the horsehair rope dangling from a bell by the wall and rang it sharply. A soft-footed priest appeared,—Father Dominico. “Eddy Horncastle? Ah! yes. Eddy, dear child, is gone.”
“Gone!” shouted Steptoe in a voice that startled the padre. “Where? When? With whom?”
“Pardon, senor, but for a time—only a pasear to the next village. It is his saint’s day—he has half-holiday. He is a good boy. It is a little pleasure for him and for us.”
“Oh!” said Steptoe, softened into a rough apology. “I forgot. All right. Has he had any visitors lately—lady, for instance?”
Father Dominico cast a look half of fright, half of reproval upon his guest.
“A lady HERE!”
In his relief Steptoe burst into a coarse laugh. “Of course; you see I forgot that, too. I was thinking of one of his woman folks, you know—relatives—aunts. Was there any other visitor?”
“Only one. Ah! we know the senor’s rules regarding his son.”
“One?” repeated Steptoe. “Who was it?”
“Oh, quite an hidalgo—an old friend of the child’s—most polite, most accomplished, fluent in Spanish, perfect in deportment. The Senor Horncastle surely could find nothing to object to. Father Pedro was charmed with him. A man of affairs, and yet a good Catholic, too. It was a Senor Van Loo—Don Paul the boy called him, and they talked of the boy’s studies in the old days as if—indeed, but for the stranger being a caballero and man of the world—as if he had been his teacher.”
It was a proof of the intensity of the father’s feelings that they had passed beyond the power of his usual coarse, brutal expression, and he only stared at the priest with a dull red face in which the blood seemed to have stagnated. Presently he said thickly, “When did he come?”
“A few days ago.”
“Which way did Eddy go?”
“To Brown’s Mills, scarcely a league away. He will be here—even now—on the instant. But the senor will come into the refectory and take some of the old Mission wine from the Catalan grape, planted one hundred and fifty years ago, until the dear child returns. He will be so happy.”
“No! I’m in a hurry. I will go on and meet him.” He took off his hat, mopped his crisp, wet hair with his handkerchief, and in a thick, slow, impeded voice, more suggestive than the outburst he restrained, said, “And as long as my son remains here that man, Van Loo, must not pass this gate, speak to him, or even see him. You hear me? See to it, you and all the others. See to it, I say, or”—He stopped abruptly, clapped his hat on the swollen veins of his forehead, turned quickly, passed out without another word through the archway into the road, and before the good priest could cross himself or recover from his astonishment the thud of his horse’s hoofs came from the dusty road.
It was ten minutes before his face resumed its usual color. But in that ten minutes, as if some of the struggle of his rider had passed into him, his horse was sweating with exhaustion and fear. For in that ten minutes, in this new imagination with which he was cursed, he had killed both Van Loo and his son, and burned the refectory over the heads of the treacherous priests. Then, quite himself again, a voice came to him from the rocky trail above the road with the hail of “Father!” He started quickly as a lad of fifteen or sixteen came bounding down the hillside, and ran towards him.
“You passed me and I called to you, but you did not seem to hear,” said the boy breathlessly. “Then I ran after you. Have you been to the Mission?”
Steptoe looked at him quite as breathlessly, but from a deeper emotion. He was, even at first sight, a handsome lad, glowing with youth and the excitement of his run, and, as the father looked at him, he could see the likeness to his mother in his clear-cut features, and even a resemblance to himself in his square, compact chest and shoulders and crisp, black curls. A thrill of purely animal paternity passed over him, the fierce joy of his flesh over his own flesh! His own son, by God! They could not take THAT from him; they might plot, swindle, fawn, cheat, lie, and steal away his affections, but there he was, plain to all eyes, his own son, his very son!
“Come here,” he said in a singular, half-weary and half-protesting voice, which the boy instantly recognized as his father’s accents of affection.
The boy hesitated as he stood on the edge of the road and pointed with mingled mischief and fastidiousness to the depths of impalpable red dust that lay between him and the horseman. Steptoe saw that he was very smartly attired in holiday guise, with white duck trousers and patent leather shoes, and, after the Spanish fashion, wore black kid gloves. He certainly was a bit of a dandy, as he had said. The father’s whole face changed as he wheeled and came before the lad, who lifted up his arms expectantly. They had often ridden together on the same horse.
“No rides to-day in that toggery, Eddy,” he said in the same voice. “But I’ll get down and we’ll go and sit somewhere under a tree and have some talk. I’ve got a bit of a job that’s hurrying me, and I can’t waste time.”
“Not one of your old jobs, father? I thought you had quite given that up?”
The boy spoke more carelessly than reproachfully, or even wonderingly; yet, as he dismounted and tethered his horse, Steptoe answered evasively, “It’s a big thing, sonny; maybe we’ll make our eternal fortune, and then we’ll light out from this hole and have a gay time elsewhere. Come along.”
He took the boy’s gloved right hand in his own powerful grasp, and together they clambered up the steep hillside to a rocky ledge on which a fallen pine from above had crashed, snapped itself in twain, and then left its withered crown to hang half down the slope, while the other half rested on the ledge. On this they sat, looking down upon the road and the tethered horse. A gentle breeze moved the treetops above their heads, and the westering sun played hide-and-seek with the shifting shadows. The boy’s face was quick and alert with all that moved round him, but without thought the father’s face was heavy, except for the eyes that were fixed upon his son.
“Van Loo came to the Mission,” he said suddenly.
The boy’s eyes glittered quickly, like a steel that pierced the father’s heart. “Oh,” he said simply, “then it was the padre told you?”
“How did he know you were here?” asked Steptoe.
“I don’t know,” said the boy quietly. “I think he said something, but I’ve forgotten it. But it was mighty good of him to come, for I thought, you know, that he did not care to see me after Heavy Tree, and that he’d gone back on us.”
“What did he tell you?” continued Steptoe. “Did he talk of me or of your mother?”
“No,” said the boy, but without any show of interest or sympathy; “we talked mostly about old times.”
“Tell ME about those old times, Eddy. You never told me anything about them.”
The boy, momentarily arrested more by something in the tone of his father’s voice—a weakness he had never noticed before—than by any suggestion of his words, said with a laugh, “Oh, only about what we used to do when I was very little and used to call myself his ‘little brother,’—don’t you remember, long before the big strike on Heavy Tree? They were gay times we had then.”
“And how he used to teach you to imitate other people’s handwriting?” said Steptoe.
“What made you think of that, pop?” said the boy, with a slight wonder in his eyes. “Why, that’s the very thing we DID talk about.”
“But you didn’t do it again; you ain’t done it since,” said Steptoe quickly.
“Lord! no,” said the boy contemptuously. “There ain’t no chance now, and there wouldn’t be any fun in it. It isn’t like the old times when him and me were all alone, and we used to write letters as coming from other people to all the boys round Heavy Tree and the Bar, and sometimes as far as Boomville, to get them to do things, and they’d think the letters were real, and they’d do ‘em. And there’d be the biggest kind of a row, and nobody ever knew who did it.”
Steptoe stared at this flesh of his own flesh half in relief, half in frightened admiration. Sitting astride the log, his elbows on his knees and his gloved hands supporting his round cheeks, the boy’s handsome face became illuminated with an impish devilry which the father had never seen before. With dancing eyes he went on. “It was one of those very games we played so long ago that he wanted to see me about and wanted me to keep mum about, for some of the folks that he played it on were around here now. It was a game we got off on one of the big strike partners long before the strike. I’ll tell YOU, dad, for you know what happened afterwards, and you’ll be glad. Well, that partner—Demorest—was a kind of silly, you remember—a sort of Miss Nancyish fellow—always gloomy and lovesick after his girl in the States. Well, we’d written lots of letters to girls from their chaps before, and got lots of fun out of it; but we had even a better show for a game here, for it happened that Van Loo knew all about the girl—things that even the man’s own partners didn’t, for Van Loo’s mother was a sort of a friend of the girl’s family, and traveled about with her, and knew that the girl was spoony over this Demorest, and that they corresponded. So, knowing that Van Loo was employed at Heavy Tree, she wrote to him to find out all about Demorest and how to stop their foolish nonsense, for the girl’s parents didn’t want her to marry a broken-down miner like him. So we thought we’d do it our own way, and write a letter to her as if it was from him, don’t you see? I wanted to make him call her awful names, and say that he hated her, that he was a murderer and a horse-thief, and that he had killed a policeman, and that he was thinking of becoming a Digger Injin, and having a Digger squaw for a wife, which he liked better than her. Lord! dad, you ought to have seen what stuff I made up.” The boy burst into a shrill, half-feminine laugh, and Steptoe, catching the infection, laughed loudly in his own coarse, brutal fashion.
For some moments they sat there looking in each other’s faces, shaking with sympathetic emotion, the father forgetting the purpose of his coming there, his rage over Van Loo’s visit, and even the rendezvous to which his horse in the road below was waiting to bring him; the son forgetting their retreat from Heavy Tree Hill and his shameful vagabond wanderings with that father in the years that followed. The sinking sun stared blankly in their faces; the protecting pines above them moved by a stronger gust shook a few cones upon them; an enormous crow mockingly repeated the father’s coarse laugh, and a squirrel scampered away from the strangely assorted pair as Steptoe, wiping his eyes and forehead with his pocket-handkerchief, said:—
“And did you send it?”
“Oh! Van Loo thought it too strong. Said that those sort of love-sick fools made more fuss over little things than they did over big things, and he sort of toned it down, and fixed it up himself. But it told. For there were never any more letters in the post-office in her handwriting, and there wasn’t any posted to her in his.”
They both laughed again, and then Steptoe rose. “I must be getting along,” he said, looking curiously at the boy. “I’ve got to catch a train at Three Boulders Station.”
“Three Boulders!” repeated the boy. “I’m going there, too, on Friday, to meet Father Cipriano.”
“I reckon my work will be all done by Friday,” said Steptoe musingly. Standing thus, holding his boy’s hand, he was thinking that the real fight at Marshall’s would not take place at once, for it might take a day or two for Marshall to gather forces. But he only pressed his son’s hand gently.
“I wish you would sometimes take me with you as you used to,” said the boy curiously. “I’m bigger now, and wouldn’t be in your way.”
Steptoe looked at the boy with a choking sense of satisfaction and pride. But he said, “No;” and then suddenly with simulated humor, “Don’t you be taken in by any letters from ME, such as you and Van Loo used to write. You hear?”
The boy laughed.
“And,” continued Steptoe, “if anybody says I sent for you, don’t you believe them.”
“No,” said the boy, smiling.
“And don’t you even believe I’m dead till you see me so. You understand. By the way, Father Pedro has some money of mine kept for you. Now hurry back to school and say you met me, but that I was in a great hurry. I reckon I may have been rather rough to the priests.”
They had reached the lower road again, and Steptoe silently unhitched his horse. “Good-by,” he said, as he laid his hand on the boy’s arm.
“Good-by, dad.”
He mounted his horse slowly. “Well,” he said smilingly, looking down the road, “you ain’t got anything more to say to me, have you?”
“No, dad.”
“Nothin’ you want?”
“Nothin’, dad.”
“All right. Good-by.”
He put spurs to his horse and cantered down the road without looking back. The boy watched him with idle curiosity until he disappeared from sight, and then went on his way, whistling and striking off the heads of the wayside weeds with his walking-stick.
CHAPTER VII
The sun arose so brightly over Hymettus on the morning after the meeting of the three partners that it was small wonder that Barker’s impressionable nature quickly responded to it, and, without awakening the still sleeping child, he dressed hurriedly, and was the first to greet it in the keen air of the slope behind the hotel. To his pantheistic spirit it had always seemed as natural for him to early welcome his returning brothers of the woods and hills as to say good-morning to his fellow mortals. And, in the joy of seeing Black Spur rising again to his level in the distance before him, he doffed his hat to it with a return of his old boyish habit, laid his arm caressingly around the great girth of the nearest pine, clapped his hands to the scampering squirrels in his path, and whistled to the dipping jays. In this way he quite forgot the more serious affairs of the preceding night, or, rather, saw them only in the gilding of the morning, until, looking up, he perceived the tall figure of Demorest approaching him; and then it struck him with his first glance at his old partner’s face that his usual suave, gentle melancholy had been succeeded by a critical cynicism of look and a restrained bitterness of accent. Barker’s loyal heart smote him for his own selfishness; Demorest had been hard hit by the discovery of the forgery and Stacy’s concern in it, and had doubtless passed a restless night, while he (Barker) had forgotten all about it. “I thought of knocking at your door, as I passed,” he said, with sympathetic apology, “but I was afraid I might disturb you. Isn’t it glorious here? Quite like the old hill. Look at that lizard; he hasn’t moved since he first saw me. Do you remember the one who used to steal our sugar, and then stiffen himself into stone on the edge of the bowl until he looked like an ornamental handle to it?” he continued, rebounding again into spirits.
“Barker,” said Demorest abruptly, “what sort of woman is this Mrs. Van Loo, whose rooms I occupy?”
“Oh,” said Barker, with optimistic innocence, “a most proper woman, old chap. White-haired, well-dressed, with a little foreign accent and a still more foreign courtesy. Why, you don’t suppose we’d”—
“But what is she like?” said Demorest impatiently.
“Well,” said Barker thoughtfully, “she’s the kind of woman who might be Van Loo’s mother, I suppose.”
“You mean the mother of a forger and a swindler?” asked Demorest sharply.
“There are no mothers of swindlers and forgers,” said Barker gravely, “in the way you mean. It’s only those poor devils,” he said, pointing, nevertheless, with a certain admiration to a circling sparrow-hawk above him, “who have inherited instincts. What I mean is that she might be Van Loo’s mother, because he didn’t SELECT her.”
“Where did she come from? and how long has she been here?” asked Demorest.
“She came from abroad, I believe. And she came here just after you left. Van Loo, after he became secretary of the Ditch Company, sent for her and her daughter to keep house for him. But you’ll see her to-day or to-morrow probably, when she returns. I’ll introduce you; she’ll be rather glad to meet some one from abroad, and all the more if he happens to be rich and distinguished, and eligible for her daughter.” He stopped suddenly in his smile, remembering Demorest’s lifelong secret. But to his surprise his companion’s face, instead of darkening as it was wont to do at any such allusion, brightened suddenly with a singular excitement as he answered dryly, “Ah well, if the girl is pretty, who knows!”
Indeed, his spirits seemed to have returned with strange vivacity as they walked back to the hotel, and he asked many other questions regarding Mrs. Van Loo and her daughter, and particularly if the daughter had also been abroad. When they reached the veranda they found a few early risers eagerly reading the Sacramento papers, which had just arrived, or, in little knots, discussing the news. Indeed, they would probably have stopped Barker and his companion had not Barker, anxious to relieve his friend’s curiosity, hurried with him at once to the manager’s office.
“Can you tell me exactly when you expect Mrs. Van Loo to return?” asked Barker quickly.
The manager with difficulty detached himself from the newspaper which he, too, was anxiously perusing, and said, with a peculiar smile, “Well no! she WAS to return to-day, but if you’re wanting to keep her rooms, I should say there wouldn’t be any trouble about it, as she’ll hardly be coming back here NOW. She’s rather high and mighty in style, I know, and a determined sort of critter, but I reckon she and her daughter wouldn’t care much to be waltzing round in public after what has happened.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Demorest impatiently. “WHAT has happened?”
“Haven’t you heard the news?” said the manager in surprise. “It’s in all the Sacramento papers. Van Loo is a defaulter—has hypothecated everything he had and skedaddled.”
Barker started. He was not thinking of the loss of his wife’s money—only of HER disappointment and mortification over it. Poor girl! Perhaps she was also worrying over his resentment,—as if she did not know him! He would go to her at once at Boomville. Then he remembered that she was coming with Mrs. Horncastle, and might be already on her way here by rail or coach, and he would miss her. Demorest in the meantime had seized a paper, and was intently reading it.
“There’s bad news, too, for your friend, your old partner,” said the manager half sympathetically, half interrogatively. “There has been a drop out in everything the bank is carrying, and everybody is unloading. Two firms failed in ‘Frisco yesterday that were carrying things for the bank, and have thrown everything back on it. There was an awful panic last night, and they say none of the big speculators know where they stand. Three of our best customers in the hotel rushed off to the bay this morning, but Stacy himself started before daylight, and got the through night express to stop for him on the Divide on signal. Shall I send any telegrams that may come to your room?”
Demorest knew that the manager suspected him of being interested in the bank, and understood the purport of the question. He answered, with calm surprise, that he was expecting no telegrams, and added, “But if Mrs. Van Loo returns I beg you to at once let me know,” and taking Barker’s arm he went in to breakfast. Seated by themselves, Demorest looked at his companion. “I’m afraid, Barker boy, that this thing is more serious to Jim than we expected last night, or than he cared to tell us. And you, old man, I fear are hurt a little by Van Loo’s flight. He had some money of your wife’s, hadn’t he?”
Barker, who knew that the bulk of Demorest’s fortune was in Stacy’s hands, was touched at this proof of his unselfish thought, and answered with equal unselfishness that he was concerned only by the fear of Mrs. Barker’s disappointment. “Why, Lord! Phil, whether she’s lost or saved her money it’s nothing to me. I gave it to her to do what she liked with it, but I’m afraid she’ll be worrying over what I think of it,—as if she did not know me! And I’m half a mind, if it were not for missing her, to go over to Boomville, where she’s stopping.”
“I thought you said she was in San Francisco?” said Demorest abstractedly.
Barker colored. “Yes,” he answered quickly. “But I’ve heard since that she stopped at Boomville on the way.”
“Then don’t let ME keep you here,” returned Demorest. “For if Jim telegraphs to me I shall start for San Francisco at once, and I rather think he will. I did not like to say so before those panic-mongers outside who are stampeding everything; so run along, Barker boy, and ease your mind about the wife. We may have other things to think about soon.”
Thus adjured, Barker rose from his half-finished breakfast and slipped away. Yet he was not quite certain what to do. His wife must have heard the news at Boomville as quickly as he had, and, if so, would be on her way with Mrs. Horncastle; or she might be waiting for him—knowing, too, that he had heard the news—in fear and trembling. For it was Barker’s custom to endow all those he cared for with his own sensitiveness, and it was not like him to reflect that the woman who had so recklessly speculated against his opinion would scarcely fear his reproaches in her defeat. In the fullness of his heart he telegraphed to her in case she had not yet left Boomville: “All right. Have heard news. Understand perfectly. Don’t worry. Come to me.” Then he left the hotel by the stable entrance in order to evade the guests who had congregated on the veranda, and made his way to a little wooded crest which he knew commanded a view of the two roads from Boomville. Here he determined to wait and intercept her before she reached the hotel. He knew that many of the guests were aware of his wife’s speculations with Van Loo, and that he was her broker. He wished to spare her running the gauntlet of their curious stares and comments as she drove up alone. As he was climbing the slope the coach from Sacramento dashed past him on the road below, but he knew that it had changed horses at Boomville at four o’clock, and that his tired wife would not have availed herself of it at that hour, particularly as she could not have yet received the fateful news. He threw himself under a large pine, and watched the stagecoach disappear as it swept round into the courtyard of the hotel.
He sat there for some moments with his eyes bent upon the two forks of the red road that diverged below him, but which appeared to become whiter and more dazzling as he searched their distance. There was nothing to be seen except an occasional puff of dust which eventually revealed a horseman or a long trailing cloud out of which a solitary mule, one of a pack-train of six or eight, would momentarily emerge and be lost again. Then he suddenly heard his name called, and, looking up, saw Mrs. Horncastle, who had halted a few paces from him between two columns of the long-drawn aisle of pines.
In that mysterious half-light she seemed such a beautiful and goddess-like figure that his consciousness at first was unable to grasp anything else. She was always wonderfully well dressed, but the warmth and seclusion of this mountain morning had enabled her to wear a light gown of some delicate fabric which set off the grace of her figure, and even pardoned the rural coquetry of a silken sash around her still slender waist. An open white parasol thrown over her shoulder made a nimbus for her charming head and the thick coils of hair under her lace-edged hat. He had never seen her look so beautiful before. And that thought was so plainly in his frank face and eyes as he sprang to his feet that it brought a slight rise of color to her own cheek.
“I saw you climbing up here as I passed in the coach a few minutes ago,” she said, with a smile, “and as soon as I had shaken the dust off I followed you.”
“Where’s Kitty?” he stammered.
The color faded from her face as it had come, and a shade of something like reproach crept into her dark eyes. And whatever it had been her purpose to say, or however carefully she might have prepared herself for this interview, she was evidently taken aback by the sudden directness of the inquiry. Barker saw this as quickly, and as quickly referred it to his own rudeness. His whole soul rushed in apology to his face as he said, “Oh, forgive me! I was anxious about Kitty; indeed, I had thought of coming again to Boomville, for you’ve heard the news, of course? Van Loo is a defaulter, and has run away with the poor child’s money.”
Mrs. Horncastle had heard the news at the hotel. She paused a moment to collect herself, and then said slowly and tentatively, with a watchful intensity in her eyes, “Mrs. Barker went, I think, to the Divide”—
But she was instantly interrupted by the eager Barker. “I see. I thought of that at once. She went directly to the company’s offices to see if she could save anything from the wreck before she saw me. It was like her, poor girl! And you—you,” he went on eagerly, his whole face beaming with gratitude,—“you, out of your goodness, came here to tell me.” He held out both hands and took hers in his.
For a moment Mrs. Horncastle was speechless and vacillating. She had often noticed before that it was part of the irony of the creation of such a simple nature as Barker’s that he was not only open to deceit, but absolutely seemed to invite it. Instead of making others franker, people were inclined to rebuke his credulity by restraint and equivocation on their own part. But the evasion thus offered to her, although only temporary, was a temptation she could not resist. And it prolonged an interview that a ruthless revelation of the truth might have shortened.
“She did not tell me she was going there,” she replied still evasively; “and, indeed,” she added, with a burst of candor still more dangerous, “I only learned it from the hotel clerk after she was gone. But I want to talk to you about her relations to Van Loo,” she said, with a return of her former intensity of gaze, “and I thought we would be less subject to interruption here than at the hotel. Only I suppose everybody knows this place, and any of those flirting couples are likely to come here. Besides,” she added, with a little half-hysterical laugh and a slight shiver, as she looked up at the high interlacing boughs above her head, “it’s as public as the aisles of a church, and really one feels as if one were ‘speaking out’ in meeting. Isn’t there some other spot a little more secluded, where we could sit down,” she went on, as she poked her parasol into the usual black gunpowdery deposit of earth which mingled with the carpet of pine-needles beneath her feet, “and not get all sticky and dirty?”