in his. Shyness and pleasure
struggled in her eyes as she fixed them on his face.

"I shall see you again," she murmured.

"How?" he asked.

"Why, you 're coming back--back to the Castle?" she cried eagerly. The
doubt of his returning thither seemed to fill her with dismay.

The Captain's scruples gave way. Perhaps it was the locket that
undermined them, perhaps that look to her eyes, and the touch of her
hands as they rested in his.

"I will do anything you bid me," he whispered.

"Then come once again." She paused. "Because I--I don't want to say
good-bye just now."

"If I come, will it be to say good-bye?"

"That shall be as you wish," she said.

It seemed to Dieppe that no confession could have been more ample, yet
none more delicately reserved in the manner of its utterance. His
answer was to clasp her in his arms and kiss her lips. But in an
instant he released her, in obedience to the faint, yet sufficient,
protest of her hands pressing him away.

"Come in an hour," she whispered, and, turning, left him and passed
from the hut.

For a moment or two he stood where he was, devoured by many conflicting
feelings. But his love, once obedient to the dictates of friendship
and the unyielding limits of honour, would not be denied now. How had
the Count of Fieramondi now any right to invoke his honour, or to
appeal to his friendship? Gladly, as a man will, the Captain seized on
another's fault to excuse his own.

"I will go again--in an hour--and I will not say good-bye," he
declared, as he flung himself down on one of the trusses of straw and
prepared to wait till it should be time for him to set out.

The evening had been so full of surprises, so prolific of turns of
fortune good and evil, so bountiful of emotions and changeful feelings,
that he had little store of surprise left wherewith to meet any new
revolution of the wheel. Nevertheless it was with something of a start
that he raised his head again from the straw on which he had for a
moment reclined, and listened intently. There had been a rustle in the
straw; he turned his head sharply to the left. But he had misjudged
the position whence the noise came. From behind the truss of straw to
his right there rose the figure of a man. Monsieur Guillaume stood
beside him, his head tied round with a handkerchief, but his revolver
in his hand. The Captain's hand flew towards his breast-pocket.

"You 'll particularly oblige me by not movi