"So?" said Mic-co quietly.
Flushing, Carl took the outstretched hand.
"I—I thank you," he said, and looked away.
The rooms of Mic-co's lodge opened, in the fashion of the old Pompeian villas, upon a central court roofed only by the Southern sky. This court, floored with split logs, covered with bearskin rugs and furnished in handmade chairs of twisted palmetto and a rude table, years back Mic-co and his Indian aides had built above a clear, lazy stream. Now the stream crept beneath the logs to a quiet open pool in the center where lilies and grasses grew, and thence by its own channel under the logs again and out. Storm coverings of buckskin were rolled above the outer windows and above the doorways which opened into the court.
Here, when the moon rose over the lonely lodge and glinted peacefully in the tilled pool, Mic-co listened to the tale of his young guest. It was a record of bodily abuse, of passion and temptation, which few men may live to tell, but Mic-co neither condoned nor condemned. He smoked and listened.
"Let us make a compact," he said with his quiet smile. "I may question without reserve. You may withhold what you will. That is fair?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever endured hardship of any kind?"
"I have hunted in the Arctics," said Carl. "There was a time when food failed. We lived for weeks on reindeer moss and rock tripe. I have been in wild territory with naturalists and hunters. Probably I have known more adventurous hardship than most men."
Mic-co nodded.
"I fancied so," he said. "What is your favorite painting?" he asked unexpectedly.
The answer came without an instant's hesitation.
"Paul Potter's 'Bull.'"
"A thing of inherent virility and vigor, intensely masculine!" said Mic-co with a smile, adding after an interval of thought, "but there is a danger in over-sexing—"
"I have sometimes thought so. The over-masculine man is too brutal."
"And the over-feminine woman?"
"Kindly, sentimental, helpless and weak. I have lived with such an aunt since I was fifteen. No, I beg of you, do not misunderstand me! I blame nothing upon her. Like many good women whose minds are blocked off in conventional squares, she is very loyal and sympathetic—and very trying. The essence of her temperament is ineffectuality. My cousin and I were a wild, unmanageable pair who rode roughshod over protest. That Aunt Agatha was not in fault may be proved by my cousin. She is a fine, true, splendid woman."
An ineffectual aunt in the critical years of adolescence! Mic-co did not suggest that his cousin's sex had been her salvation.
So nights by the pool Mic-co plumbed the depths of his young guest with the fine, tired eyes.
"Tell me," he said gently another night; "this inordinate sensitiveness of which you speak. To what do you attribute it?"
Carl colored.
"My mother," he said, "was courageous and unconventional. She recognized the fact that marriage and monogamy are not the ethical answers of the future—that though ideal unions sometimes result, it is not because of marriage, but in spite of it—that motherhood is the inalienable right of every woman with the divine spark in her heart, no matter what the disappointing lack of desirable marriage chances in her life may be. Therefore, when the years failed to produce her perfect and desirable human complement, she sought a eugenic mate and bore me, refusing to saddle herself to a meaningless, man-made partnership with infinite possibilities of domestic hell in it, merely as a sop to the world-Cerberus of convention. Marriage could have added nothing to her lofty conceptions of motherhood—but I—I have been keenly resentful and sensitive—for her. I think it has been the feeling that no one understood. Then, after she died, there was no one—only Philip. I saw him rarely."
"And your cousin?"
"She had been taught—to misunderstand. There was always that barrier. And she is very high spirited. Though we were much together as youngsters she could not forget."
A singular maternal history, a beautiful, high-spirited, intolerant cousin who had been taught to despise his mother's morality! What warring forces indeed had gone to the making of this man before him.
"You have been lonely?"
"Yes," said Carl. "My mother died when I needed her most. Later when I was very lonely—or hurt—I drank."
"And brooded!" finished Mic-co quietly.
"Yes," said Carl. "Always." He spoke a little bitterly of the wild inheritance of passions and arrogant intolerance with which Nature had saddled him.
"All of which," reminded Mic-co soberly, "you inflamed by intemperate drinking. Is it an inherited appetite?"
"It is not an appetite at all," said Carl.
"You like it?"
"If you mean that to abandon it is to suffer—no. I enjoyed it—-yes."
The wind that blew through the open windows and doors of the lodge stirred the moonlit water lilies in the pool. To Carl they were pale and unreal like the wraith of the days behind him. Like a reflected censer in the heart of the bloom shone the evening star. The peace of it all lay in Mic-co's fine, dark, tranquil face as he talked, subtly moulding another's mind in the pattern of his own. He did not preach. Mic-co smoked and talked philosophy.
Carl had known but little respect for the opinions of others. He was to learn it now. He was to find his headstrong will matched by one stronger for all it was gentler; his impudent philosophy punctured by a wisdom as great as it was compassionate; his own magnetic power to influence as he willed, a negligible factor in the presence of a man whose magnetism was greater.
Mic-co had said quietly by the pool one night that he had been a doctor—that he loved the peace and quiet of his island home—that years back the Seminoles had saved his life. He had since devoted his own life to their service. They were a pitiful, hunted remnant of a great race who were kindred to the Aztec.
He seemed to think his explanation quite enough. Wherefore Carl as quietly accepted what he offered. There was much that he himself was pledged to withhold. Thus their friendship grew into something fine and deep that was stronger medicine for Carl than any preaching.
"My mother and I were friends!" said Carl one night. "When I was a lad of ten or so, as a concession to convention she married the man whose name I bear, a kindly chap who understood. He died. After that we were very close, my mother and I. We rode much together and talked. I think she feared for me. There was peace in my life then—like this. That is why I speak of it. I needed a friend, some one like her with brains and grit and balance that I could respect—some one who would understand. There are but few—"
"She spoke of your own father?"
"No. I do not even know his name. We were pledged not to speak of it. I fancied as I grew older that she was sorry—"
The subject was obviously painful.
"And you've never been honestly contented since?" put in Mic-co quickly.
"Once." Carl spoke of Wherry. "They were weeks of genuine hardship, those weeks at the farm, but it's singular how frequently my mind goes back to them."
"Ah!" said Mic-co with glowing eyes, "there is no salvation like work for the happiness of another. That I know."
So the quiet days filed by until Mic-co turned at last from the healing of the mind to the healing of the body.
"Let us test your endurance in the Seminole way," he said one morning by the island camp fire where his Indian servants cooked the food for the lodge. Beyond lay the palmetto wigwams of the Indian servants who worked in the island fields of corn and rice and sugar cane, made wild cassava into flour, hunted with Mic-co and rode betimes with the island exports into civilization by the roundabout road to the south which skirted the swamp. Off to the west, in the curious chain of islands, lay the palmetto shelter of the horses.
Mic-co placed a live coal upon the wrist of his young guest and quietly watched. There was no flinching. The coal burned itself out upon the motionless wrist of a Spartan.
Thereafter they rode hard and hunted, day by day. Carl worked in the fields with Mic-co and the Indians, tramped at sunset over miles of island path fringed with groves of bitter orange, disciplining his body to a new endurance. A heavy sweat at the end in a closed tent of buckskin which opened upon the shore of a sheltered inland lake, hardened his aching muscles to iron.
Upon the great stone heating in the fire within the sweat-lodge an Indian lad poured water. It rose in sweltering clouds of steam about the naked body of Mic-co's guest, who at length plunged from the tent into the chill waters of the lake and swam vigorously across to towels and shelter.
Carl learned to pole a cypress canoe dexterously through miles of swamp tangled with grass and lilies, through shallows and deep pools darkened by hanging branches. He learned to tan hides and to carry a deer upon his shoulders. Nightly he plunged from the sweat-lodge into the lake and later slept the sleep of utter weariness under a deerskin cover.
So Mic-co disciplined the splendid body and brain of his guest to the strength and endurance of an Indian; but the quiet hours by the pool brought with them the subtler healing.
Carl grew browner and sturdier day by day. His eyes were quieter. There was less of arrogance too in the sensitive mouth and less of careless assertiveness in his manner.
So matters stood when Philip rode in by the southern trail with Sho-caw.
Now Philip had wisely waited for the inevitable readjustment, trusting entirely to Mic-co, but with the memory of Carl's haggard face and haunted eyes, he was unprepared for the lean, tanned, wholly vigorous young man who sprang to meet him.
"Well!" said Philip. "Well!"
He was shaken a little and cleared his throat, at a loss for words.
"You—you infernal dub!" said Carl. It was all he could trust himself to say.
It was a singular greeting, Mic-co thought, and very eloquent.
To the heart of the gypsy there is a kindred voice in the cheerful crackle of a camp fire—in the wind that rustles tree and grass—in the song of a bird or the hum of bees—in the lap of a lake or the brilliant trail of a shooting star.
A winter forest of tracking snow is rife with messages of furry folk who prowl by night. Moon-checkered trees fling wavering banners of gypsy hieroglyphics upon the ground. Sun and moon and cloud and the fiery color-pot of the firmament write their symbols upon the horizon for gypsy eyes to read.
What wonder then that the milky clouds which piled fantastically above the Indian camp fashioned hazily at times into curious boats sailing away to another land? What wonder if the dawn was streaked with imperial purple? What wonder if Diane built faces and fancies in the ember-glow of the Seminole fire-wheel? What wonder if like the pine-wood sparrow and the wind of Okeechobee the voice of the woodland always questioned? Conscience, soul-argument—what you will—there were voices in the wild which stirred the girl's heart to introspection.
So it was with the rain which, at the dark of the moon, pattered gently on the palmetto roof of her wigwam.
"And now," said the rain with a soft gust of flying drops, "now there is Sho-caw!"
"Yes," said Diane with a sigh, "there is Sho-caw. I am very sorry."
"But," warned the rain, "one must not forget. At Keela's teaching you have fallen into the soft, musical tongue of these Indian folk with marvelous ease. And you wear the Seminole dress of a chief—"
"Yes. After all, that was imprudent—"
"You can ride and shoot an arrow swift and far. Your eyes are keen and your tread lithe and soft like a fawn—"
"It is all the wild lore of the woodland I learned as a child."
"But Sho-caw does not know! To him the gypsy heart of you, the sun-brown skin and scarlet cheeks, the night-black hair beneath the turban, are but the lure and charm of an errant daughter of the O-kee-fee-ne-kee wilderness. What wonder that he can not see you as you are, a dark-eyed child of the race of white men!"
"I do not wonder."
"He has been grave and very deferential, gathered wood for you and carried water. Yesterday there was a freshly killed deer at the door of the wigwam. It is the first shy overture of the wooing Seminole."
"I know. Keela has told me. It has all frightened me a little. I—I think I had better go away again."
"There was a time, in the days of Arcadia, when Philip would have laughed, and a second deer would have lain at the door of your wig-wam—"
"Philip is changed."
"He is quieter—"
"Yes."
"A little sterner—"
"Yes."
"Like one perhaps who has abandoned a dream!"
"I—do—not—know."
"Why does he ride away for days with Sho-caw?"
"I have wondered."
The wind, wafting from the rain which splashed in the pool of Mic-co's court, might have told, but the wind, with the business of rain upon its mind, was reticent.
"And Ronador?"
"I have not forgotten."
"He is waiting."
"Yes. Day by day I have put off the thought of the inevitable reckoning. It is another reason why presently I must hurry away."
"A singular trio of suitors!" sighed the rain. "A prince—an Indian warrior—and a spy!"
"Not that!" cried the girl's heart. "No, no—not that!"
"You breathed it but a minute ago!"
"I know—"
"And of the three, Sho-caw, bright copper though he is, is perhaps braver—"
"No!"
"Taller—"
"He is not so tall as Philip."
"To be sure Philip is brown and handsome and sturdy and very strong, but Ronador—ah!—there imperial distinction and poise are blended with as true a native grace as Sho-caw's—"
"Humor and resource are better things."
"Sho-caw's grace is not so heavy as Ronador's—and not so sprightly as Philip's—"
"It may be."
"One may tell much by the color and expression of a man's eye. Sho-caw's eyes are keen, alert and grave; Ronador's dark, compelling and very eloquent. What though there is a constant sense of suppression and smouldering fire and not quite so much directness as one might wish—"
"Philip's eyes are calm and steady and very frank," said the girl, "and he is false."
"Yes," said the rain with a noise like a shower of tears, "yes, he is very false."
The wind sighed. The steady drip of the rain, filtering through the vines twisted heavily about the oak trunks, was indescribably mournful. Suddenly the nameless terror that had crept into the girl's veins that first night in the Seminole camp came again.
"When the Mulberry Moon is at its full," she said shuddering, "I will go back to the van with Keela. I do not know what it is here that frightens me so. And I will marry Ronador. Every wild thing in the forest loves and mates. And I—I am very lonely."
But by the time the Mulberry Moon of the Seminoles blanketed the great marsh in misty silver Diane was restlessly on her way back to the world of white men.
Philip followed. Leaner, browner, a little too stern, perhaps, about the mouth and eyes, a gypsy of greater energy and resource than when he had struck recklessly into the Glades with the music-machine he had since exchanged for an Indian wagon, Philip camped and smoked and hunted with the skill and gravity of an Indian.
So the wagons filed back again into the little hamlet where Johnny waited, daily astonishing the natives by a series of lies profoundly adventurous and thrilling. Rex's furious bark of welcome at the sight of his young mistress was no whit less hysterical than Johnny's instant groan of relief, or the incoherent manner in which he detailed an unforgettable interview with Aunt Agatha, who had appeared one night from heaven knows where and pledged him with tears and sniffs innumerable to telegraph her when from the melancholy fastnesses of the Everglades, Diane or her scalp emerged.
"She wouldn't go North," finished Johnny graphically, his apple cheeks very red and his eyes very bright, "she certainly would not—she'd like to see herself—she would indeed!—and this no place for me to wait. Them very words, Miss Diane. And she went and opened your grandfather's old house in St. Augustine—the old Westfall homestead—and she's there now waitin'. Likely, Miss Diane, I'd better telegraph now—this very minute—afore she takes it in her head to come again!"
Johnny's dread of another Aunt Agathean visitation was wholly candid and sincere. He departed on a trot to telegraph, hailing Philip warmly by the way.
Here upon the following morning Diane and Keela parted—for the Indian girl was pledged to return to the lodge of Mic-co.
"Six moons, now," she explained with shining eyes, "I stay at the lodge of Mic-co, my foster father. When the Falling Leaf Moon of November comes, I shall still be there, living the ways of white men." She held out her hand. "Aw-lip-ka-shaw!" she said shyly, her black eyes very soft and sorrowful. "It is a prettier parting than the white man's. By and by, Diane, you will write to the lodge of Mic-co? The Indian lads ride in each moon to the village for Mic-co's books and papers." Her great eyes searched Diane's face a little wistfully. "Sometime," she added shyly, "when you wish, I will come again. You will not ride away soon to the far cities of the North?"
"No!" said Diane. "No indeed! Not for ever so long. I'm tired. Likely I'll hunt a quiet spot where there's a lake and trees and lilies, and camp and rest. You won't forget me, Keela?"
Keela had a wordless gift of eloquence. Her eyes promised.
Diane smiled and tightened her hold of the slim, brown Indian hand.
"Aw-lip-ka-shaw, Keela!" she said. "Some day I'm coming back and take you home with me."
The Indian girl drove reluctantly away; presently her canvas wagon was but a dim gray silhouette upon the horizon.
Northward by lazy canal and shadowy hummock, northward by a river freckled with sand bars, Diane came in time to a quiet lake where purple martins winged ceaselessly over a tangled float of lilies—where now and then an otter swam and dipped with a noiseless ripple of water—where ground doves fluttered fearlessly about the camp as Johnny pitched the tents at noonday.
But for all the whir and flash of brilliant birdlife above the placid water—for all the screams of the fish hawks and the noise of crows and grackle in the cypress—for all the presence of another camper among the trees to the west, the days were quiet and undisturbed. And at night when the birds were winging to the woods now black against the yellow west, and the lonely lake began to purple, the fires of the rival camps were the single spots of color in the heavy darkness along the shore.
Diane wrote of it, with disastrous results, to Aunt Agatha.
At sunset, one day, a carriage produced an aggrieved rustle of silk, a voice and a hand bag. Each fluttered a little as the driver accepted his fare and rolled away. The hand bag, in accordance with a sensational and ill-conditioned habit which had roused more than one unpopular commotion in crowded department stores and thoroughfares, leaped unexpectedly from a gloved and fluttering hand.
Aunt Agatha possessed herself of the bag with a sniff and rustled heedlessly into the nearest camp.
It was, of course, Mr. Poynter's.
Utterly confounded by the unexpected sight of a tall young man who was cooking a fish over the fire, Aunt Agatha gurgled fearfully and backed precipitately into the nearest tree, whence the ill-natured hand bag forcibly opened a grinning mouth, leaped into space and disgorged a flying shower of nickels and dimes, smelling salts and hairpins and a variety of fussy contrivances of sentimental value.
"God bless my soul!" bleated Aunt Agatha with round, affrighted eyes, "there's a dime in the fish! And I do beg your pardon, young man, but will you be so good as to poke the smelling salts out of the fire before they explode."
There was little likelihood of the final catastrophe, but Mr. Poynter obeyed. Laughing a little as he collected the scattered cargo, he good-humoredly suggested that he was not nearly so dangerous as Aunt Agatha's petrified gaze suggested, and that possibly she might remember him—his name was Poynter—and that Miss Westfall's camp lay a little farther to the east.
Aunt Agatha departed, greatly impressed by his gallantry and common sense. Arriving in the camp of her niece, she roused an alarming commotion by halting unobserved among the trees, staring hard at her niece's back-hair, dropping her hand bag, and bursting into tears that brought the startled campers to her side in a twinkling.
"Great Scott, Johnny!" exclaimed Diane, aghast. "It's Aunt Agatha!"
Aunt Agatha dangerously motioned them away with the hand bag Johnny had returned.
"I'll be all right in a minute!" she sniffed tearfully. "Mamma was that way, too—mamma was. Tears would burst right out of her, especially when she grew so stout. I can't help it! When I think of all I've gone through with you off in the Green-glades or the Never-glades or whatever they are—and worrying all the time about your scalp and alligators—and you sitting there so peaceful, Diane, with your hair still on—I've got to cry—I just have and I will. And Carl's mysteriously disappeared—Heaven knows where! I've not seen him for weeks. Nor did he condescend to write me—as I must say you did—and very good of you too!" Whether Aunt Agatha was crying because her mother was stout and eruptively lachrymose, or because Diane's hair was still where it belonged, or because Carl was missing, Diane could not be sure.
Aunt Agatha puffed presently to a seat by the fire, with hair and hat awry, and dropped her hand bag.
"Johnny," she said severely, "don't stare so. I'm sorry of course that I made you drop the kettle when I came, I am indeed, but I'm here and there's the kettle—and that's all there is to it."
"Of course it is!" exclaimed Diane, kissing her heartily. "And I'm mighty glad to see you, Aunt Agatha, tears and all!"
There was some little difficulty in persuading Aunt Agatha of the truth of this, but she presently removed her hat, narrowly escaped dropping it into the fire, and consigned it, along with the athletic hand bag, to Johnny.
Now Diane with a furtive glance at Philip's camp, had been hostilely considering the discouraging effect of Aunt Agatha's presence upon the rival camper. That Aunt Agatha would presently discern degenerative traces of criminality in his face by reason of his reprehensible proximity to her niece's camp, Diane did not doubt. That the aggrieved lady would call upon him within a day or so and air her rigid notions of propriety and convention, was well within the range of probability. Wherefore—
Aunt Agatha broke plaintively in upon her thoughts.
"If you would only listen, Diane!" she complained. "I've spoken three times of your grandfather's old estate and dear knows you ought to remember it—"
"I beg your pardon, Aunt!" stammered the girl sincerely.
"Certainly," said Aunt Agatha with dignity, "I deserve some attention. What with the dark, gloomy rooms of the house and the cobwebs and cranky spiders—and the people of St. Augustine believing it to be haunted—so that I could scarcely keep a servant—and green mould in the cellar—and a croquet set—and waiting down South when I distinctly promised to go back with the Sherrills in March—I take it very hard of you, Diane, to be so absent-minded. Ugh! How dark the lake has grown and the wind and the noise of the water. There's hardly a star. Diane, I do wonder how you stand it. The shore looks like bands of mourning crepe. And in the midst of it all, Diane, there in St. Augustine, the Baron aeroplaned the top off the Carroll's orchard—"
"Aunt Agatha!" begged the girl helplessly. "What in the world is it all about?"
Aunt Agatha flushed guiltily.
"Why is it," she demanded, "that no one ever seems to understand what I'm saying? Dear knows I haven't a harelip or even a lisp. Why, Baron Tregar, my dear. He's been staying in St. Augustine, too. It almost seemed as if he had deliberately followed me there—though of course that couldn't be. And the Prince too. And the Baron bought an aeroplane to amuse himself and annoy the Carrolls—"
Aunt Agatha flushed again, cleared her throat and looked away. Why Ronador was in St. Augustine she knew well enough. He had waited near her, successfully, for news of Diane. And though the Baron had been very quiet, he had kept his eye upon the Prince. Aunt Agatha had for once been the startled hub of intrigue.
"And what with the driver mumbling to himself this afternoon because I lost my umbrella and made him go back, and the horse having ribs," she complained, shying from a topic which contained dangerous possibilities of revealing a certain indiscretion, "I do wonder I'm here at all. And the young man was very decent about the dime in his fish—though I'm sure he burned his fingers digging for the smelling salts—for they'd already begun to sizzle—but dear me! Diane, you can't imagine how I jarred my spine and my switch—I did think for a minute it would tumble off—and he was so quick and pleasant to collect the nickels and hairpins. Such a pleasant, comfortable sort of chap. I remember now he was at the Sherrill's and very good-looking, too, I must say, and very lonely too, I'll wager, camping about for his health. He didn't say anything about his health, but one can see by his eyes that he's troubled about it."
"Aunt Agatha!" begged Diane helplessly in a flash of foreboding, "what in creation are you trying to say?"
"Why, Mr. Poynter, of course!" exclaimed Aunt Agatha. "The hand bag shot into his camp and spilled nickels, and I bumped into a tree and jarred my switch. And a very fine fellow he is, to be sure!"
Diane stared.
It was like Aunt Agatha to blunder into the wrong camp. And surely it was like Philip to win her favor by chance.
The friendship of Aunt Agatha and Mr. Poynter miraculously grew. Aunt Agatha, upon the following morning, took to wandering vaguely about the wooded shore and into Philip's camp, impelled by gracious concern for his health, which she insisted upon regarding as impaired, and by effusive gratitude for such trifling civilities as he had readily proffered the day before. From there she wandered vaguely back to her niece's camp fire in a chronic state of worry about Carl. Discontented, unfailing in her melancholy reminiscences of cannibalistic snakes and herons. Aunt Agatha plainly had no immediate intentions of any sort. She had no intention of lingering in camp, she said, accoutered solely with a hand bag! And she had no intention—no indeed!—of departing until Diane went back with her to the deserted Westfall house in St. Augustine, with the green mould and the cobwebs and cranky spiders and the croquet set in the cellar. Arcadia, if Diane had not crushed the memory out of her heart, had had a parallel.
Greatly disturbed by her aunt's melancholy state of uncertainty, Diane one morning watched her set forth to gather lilies in the region of Philip's camp.
The woodland about was very quiet. Diane lay back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes, listening to the welcome gypsy voices of wind and water, to the noisy clapper rails in the island grass at the end of the lake and to the drone of a motor on the road to the north. Dimly conscious that Johnny was briskly scrubbing the rude table among the trees, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, with a nervous start, Johnny was down at the edge of the lake scouring pans with sand and whistling blithely. Off there to the west, with Aunt Agatha fussing at his heels, Philip was good-naturedly gathering the lilies at the water's edge. And some one was approaching camp from the northern road.
Diane glanced carelessly to the north and sprang to her feet with wild scarlet in her cheeks.
Ronador was coming through the forest.
His color was a little high, his eyes, beneath the peak of his motoring cap profoundly apologetic, but he was easier in manner than Diane.
"I'm offending, I know," he said steadily, "and I crave forgiveness, but muster an indifferent gift of patience as best I may, I can not wait. It is weeks, you recall—"
Diane flushed brightly.
"Yes," she said. "I know. I have been in the Everglades."
"Your aunt told me." Ronador searched her face suddenly with peculiar intentness. He might have added, with perfect truth, that to Aunt Agatha, who had indiscreetly afforded him a glimpse of her niece's letter, might be attributed the halting of the long, black car on the road to the north. "You have no single word of welcome, then!" he reproached abruptly and impatiently brushed his hair back from his forehead with a hand that shook a little.
From the north came the clatter of a motorcycle.
Diane held out her hand.
"Let us make a mutual compact!" she exclaimed frankly. "I have overstrained your patience—you have startled me. Let us both forgive. In a sense we have neither of us kept strictly to the letter of our agreement."
Ronador bent with deference over the girl's outstretched hand and brushed it lightly with his lips, unconscious that her face had grown very white and troubled. Nor in his impetuous relief was he aware that other eyes had witnessed the eloquent tableau and that Aunt Agatha had arrived in camp with an escort who quietly deposited an armful of dripping lilies upon the camp table and oddly enough made no effort to retire.
When at length, conscious of the electric constraint of the atmosphere, Ronador wheeled uncomfortably and met Philip's level glance, he stared and reddened, hot insolent anger in the flash of his eyes and the curl of his lips.
"Dear me!" faltered Aunt Agatha, guiltily conscious of the letter, "I am surprised, I am indeed! Who ever would have thought of seeing you here, Prince, among the trees and—and the ground doves and—and all the lilies!" The unfortunate lady, convinced by now that Ronador's apparent resentment concerned, in some inexplicable way, her escort, herself and the lilies, glanced beseechingly about her. "And what with the lilies," she burst forth desperately in apology for the inopportune arrival of herself and her escort, "what with the lilies, Prince, and the water so wet—though, dear me! it was not to be wondered at, of course—growing wild in the water that way—and only one gown and the hand bag—though to be sure I can't wear the hand bag, and wouldn't if I could—-Mr. Poynter, with his usual courtesy was good enough to carry the lilies into camp when I asked him."
"Mr. Poynter was undoubtedly very good, Aunt Agatha," said Diane quietly, "but the lilies scarcely require any further attention."
Still Mr. Poynter did not stir.
"I regret exceedingly," he said formally to Diane, "that I am unable to avail myself of your cordial permission to retire. Unfortunately, I have urgent business with Prince Ronador. Indeed, I have waited for just such an opportunity as this."
He was by far the calmest of the four. Ronador's violent temper was rapidly routing his studied composure. Diane's lovely face was flushed and indignant. Aunt Agatha, making a desperate pretense of sorting the lilies, was plainly in a flutter and willing to be tearfully repentent over their intrusion. Not so Philip. There was satisfaction in his steady glance.
"There is scarcely any business which I may have with—er—Tregar's secretary," said Ronador with deliberate insolence, "which may not be more suitably discharged by Tregar himself."
There was a biting suggestion of rank in his answer at which Philip smiled.
"My spread-eagle tastes," he admitted, "have always protected my eyes from the bedazzlement frequently incident to the sight of royalty. Nor do I wish to flaunt unduly my excellent fortune in being born an American and a democrat, but for once. Prince, we must overlook your trifling disadvantage of caste and meet on a common footing. Permit me to offer my humble secretarial apology that the business is wholly mine—and one other's—and not my chief's."
Here Aunt Agatha created a singular diversion by dropping the lilies and gurgling with amazement.
"God bless my soul!" she screamed hysterically, conscious that her indiscretion was rapidly weaving a web around her which might not find favor in her niece's eyes, "it's Baron Tregar! I know his beard."
Now as it was manifestly impossible for the Baron and his beard to be secreted among the lilies which Aunt Agatha was wildly gathering up, Philip looked off in the wood to the north.
There was a motorcyclist approaching who had conceivably felt sufficient interest in the long black car to follow it.
The Baron arrived, gallantly swept off his cap and bowed, and suddenly conscious of an indefinable hostility in the attitudes of the silent quartet, stared from one to the other with some pardonable astonishment.
"Tregar!" shouted the Prince hotly, "you will account to me for this officious espionage."
The Baron stroked his beard.
"One may pay his respects to Miss Westfall?" he begged with gentle sarcasm. "It is a sufficiently popular epidemic, I should say, to claim even me. Besides," he added dryly, "in reality I have come in answer to a letter of Poynter's. It has interested me exceedingly to find you on the road ahead of me."
"Baron Tregar," said Diane warmly, "you are very welcome, I assure you. Mr. Poynter has been pleased to inject certain elements of melodrama into his chance intrusion. Otherwise you would not find us staring at each other in this exceedingly ridiculous manner!"
"Hum!" said the Baron blandly and glanced with interest at the undisturbed countenance of Mr. Poynter.
"A mere matter of justice and belated frankness to Miss Westfall!" said Philip quietly. "I must respectfully beg Prince Ronador to disclose to her the original motive of his singular and highly romantic courtship. I bear an urgent message of similar import from one who has had the distinction of playing—imperial chess!"
They were curious words but not so curious in substance as in effect. With a cry of startled anger, Ronador leaped back, his eyes flashing terrible menace at Philip. There was only one pair of eyes, however, quick and keen enough, for all their loveliness, to follow his swift movement or the glitter of steel in his hand.
With a cry of fear and horror, Diane leaped like a wild thing and struck his hand aside. A revolver fell at her feet. Aunt Agatha screamed and covered her eyes with her hands.
In the tense quiet came the tranquil lap of the lake, the call of a distant bird, the lazy murmur of many leaves in a morning wind. Philip stood very quietly by the table. He looked at Diane; he seemed to have forgotten the others, Tregar thought.
With terrible anger in her flashing eyes, Diane flung the revolver into the placid lake, and facing Ronador, her sweet, stern mouth contemptuous, she met his imploring gaze with one of scathing rebuke.
"Excellency," she said to Ronador, "whatever else Mr. Poynter may have in mind, there is surely now an explanation which it behooves you to make as a gentleman who is not a coward!"
Ronador moistened his white lips and looked away.
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."
"Why must we talk in riddles?" cried Diane with a flash of impatience. "Why does Ronador fear for his son? Where is the candlestick? And the paper? Who found it?"
"Carl found it," said Philip. "It was written nearly a quarter of a century ago, by one—Theodomir of Houdania."
Diane glanced in utter mystification at Ronador's ashen face—there was a great fear in his eyes—and thence to Baron Tregar.
"Excellency," she appealed, "it is all very hard to understand. Who is Theodomir? And why must his life touch mine after all these years?"
The Baron cleared his throat.
"Let me try to make it simpler," he said gravely. "Theodomir, Miss Westfall, was a lovable, willful, over-democratic young crown prince of Houdania who, many years ago, refused the responsibilities of a royal position whose pomp and pretensions he despised—quoting Buddha—and fled to America where in the course of time he married, divorced his wife and later died—incognito. He was Ronador's cousin, and his flight shifted the regency of the kingdom to Ronador's father."
"Yes," said the girl steadily, "that is very clear."
"Theodomir married—and divorced—your mother," said Philip gently.
Diane grew very white.
"And even yet," she said bravely, "I—can not see why we must all be so worked up. There is more?"
"Yes. Later, after her divorce from Theodomir, your mother married Norman Westfall—"
"My father," corrected Diane swiftly.
Philip looked away.
"Her second marriage," he said at last, "was childless."
"Philip!" Diane's face flamed. "And I?"
"You," said Baron Tregar, "are the child of Theodomir."
In the strained silence a bird sent a sweet, clear call ringing lightly over the water.
"That—that can not be!" faltered Diane. "It—it is too preposterous."
"I wish to Heaven it were!" said Philip quietly. "Whether or not it was Theodomir's wish that his daughter be reared, in the eyes of the world, as the daughter of Norman Westfall, to protect her from any consequences incident to his possible discovery and enforced return to Houdania, it is impossible to say. Hating royalty as he did, he may have sought thus to shield his daughter from its taint. Why he weakened and consigned the secret to paper—how or when he hid it in an ancient candlestick in the home of Norman Westfall, remains shrouded in utter mystery. It is but one of the many points that need light."
Again the Baron cleared his throat.
"And," said he, "since unwisely, Miss Westfall, for eugenic reasons, we grant a certain freedom of marital choice to our princes—since wisely or not as you will, the Salic Law does not, by an ancient precedent, obtain with us, and a woman may come in the line of succession, the danger to Ronador's little son, is, I think, apparent."
"Surely, surely!" exclaimed Diane hopelessly, "there is some mistake. There is so much that is utterly without light or coherence. So much—"
For the first time Ronador spoke.
"What," said he sullenly to Philip, "would you have us do?"
"I would have you eliminate the secrecy, the infernal intrigue, the scheming to smother a fire that burned wilder for your efforts," said Philip civilly. "I would have you face this thing squarely and investigate it link by link. I would have you abandon the damnable man-hunt that has sent one man to his death in a Florida swamp and goaded another to a reckless frenzy in which all things were possible. Themar is dead. That Granberry is alive is attributable solely to the fact that he was cleverer and keener than any of those who hounded him. But he has paid heavily for the secret he tried in a drunken moment to sell to Houdania."
"I do not understand Carl's part in it," said Diane. "Nor can I see—"
But whatever it was that Diane could not see was not destined for immediate revealment. At the mention of Carl's name by her niece, Aunt Agatha came unexpectedly into the limelight with a gurgle and fainted dead away. Her white affrighted face had been turned upon Ronador in fearful fascination since Diane had struck his arm. Whether or not she had comprehended any of the talk that followed is a matter of doubt.
When at last, after an interval of flurry and excitement in the camp, Aunt Agatha gasped, sat up again and stared wildly at the sympathetic line of faces about her, Ronador was gone. When or where he had gone, no one knew. Only Diane caught the whir of his motor on the road to the north.
"It is better so," said Tregar compassionately. "Though his love began in treachery, Miss Westfall, and drove him through the mire, it was, I think, genuine. A man may not see his hopes take wing with comfort. And Ronador's life has not been of the happiest."
"Excellency," said Philip who had been wandering restlessly about among the trees, "I know that you are but an indifferent gypsy, and strongly averse to baked potatoes, but such as it is, let me extend to you the hospitality of my camp. Doubtless Miss Westfall will dispatch Johnny for your motorcycle."
The Baron accepted.
"There is one thing more, Miss Westfall," he added as they were leaving. "Frankness is such a refreshing experience for me, that I must drink of the fount again. Days back, a headstrong young secretary of mine of considerable nerve and independence and—er—intermittent disrespect for his chief—-having come to grief through a knife of Themar's intended for another—refused, with a habit of infernal politeness he has which I find most maddening, refused, mademoiselle, to execute a certain little commission of mine because he quixotically fancied it savored of spying!"
"Tregar!" said Philip with an indignant flush. And added with an uncomfortable conviction of disrespect, "Er—Excellency!"
"I said—intermittent disrespect," reminded Tregar. "Moreover," he continued, stroking his beard and selecting his words with the precision of the careful linguist that he was, "this secretary of mine, after an interview of most disconcerting candor, took to the road and a hay-cart in a dudgeon, constituting himself, in a characteristic outburst of suspicion, quixotism, chivalry and protection, a sentinel to whom lack of sleep, the discomforts of a hay-camp—and—er—spying black-and-tans were nothing. I have reason for suspecting that he may have been misrepresented and misjudged—"
"Excellency," said Philip shortly, "my camp lies yonder. And Mrs. Westfall will doubtless rejoice when her niece's camp is quiet."
Diane met the Baron's glance with a bright flush.
"Excellency," she said, "I thank you."
The two men disappeared among the trees.