"Oh, don't!" she begged. "Don't speak so flippantly of it!

How can you? And don't think for one instant, that I doubted your word. I didn't. But it didn't seem possible that such a thing--Mr. Brice!" she broke off earnestly. "You mustn't--you can't--think that Milo knew anything of this! I mean about the--the snakes and all. He is enough to blame--he has shamed our hospitality and every trace of grat.i.tude enough--by letting you be locked in there at all and by consenting to have you marooned on the key. I'm not trying to excuse him for that. There's no excuse. And without proof I wouldn't have believed it of him. But at least you must believe he had no part in--in the other--"

"I do believe it," said Gavin, gently, touched to the heart by her grief and shame. "At first, I was certain he had connived at it. But what you overheard proves he didn't."

"Thank you," she said simply.

This time it was his hand that sought hers. And, even as she, he was unconscious of the action.

"You mustn't let this distress you so," he soothed, noting her effort to fight back the tears. "It all came out safely enough. But--I think I've paid to-day for my right to ask such a question--how does it happen that you and your brother--you, especially--can have sunk to such straits that you take orders meekly from a murderer like Rodney Hade, and that you let him dictate what guests you shall or shan't receive?"

She shivered all over.

"I--I have no right to tell you," she murmured. "It isn't my secret. I have no right to say there is any secret. But there is! And it is making my life a torture! If only you knew--if only there were some one I could turn to for help or even for advice! But I'm all alone, except for Milo. And lately he's changed so! I--"

She broke down all at once in her valiant attempt at calmness. And burying her face in her hands again she burst into a tempest of weeping. Gavin Brice, a lump in his own throat, drew her to him. And she clung to his soaked coat lapels hiding her head on his drenched breast.

There was nothing of love or of s.e.x in the action. She was simply a heartbroken child seeking refuge in the strength of some one older and stronger than she. Gavin realized it, and he held her to him and comforted her as though she had been his little sister.

Presently the pa.s.sion of convulsive weeping pa.s.sed, leaving her broken and exhausted. Gavin knew the girl's powers of mental resistance were no longer strong enough to overcome her need for a comforter to whom she could unburden her soul of its miserable perplexities.

She had drawn back from his embrace but she still sat close to him, her hands in his, pathetically eager for his sympathy and aid. The psychological moment had come and Gavin Brice knew it. Loathing himself for the role he must play and vowing solemnly to his own heart that she should never be allowed to suffer for any revelation she might make, he said with a gentle insistence, "Tell me."

CHAPTER VII

SECRETS

There was a short silence. Brice looked anxiously through the gathering darkness at the dimly seen face so near to his own.

He could not guess, for the life of him, whether the girl was silent because she refused to tell him what he sought so eagerly to know, or whether she was still fighting to control her voice.

As he sat gazing down at her, there was something so tiny, so fragile, so helplessly trustful about her, that it went straight to the man's heart. He had played and schemed and risked life itself for this crucial hour, for this hour when he should have swept aside the girl's possible suspicions and enlisted her complete sympathy for himself and could make her trust him and feel keen remorse for the treatment he had received.

Yes--he had achieved all this. And he had done infinitely more. He had awakened in her heart a sense of loneliness and of need for some one in whom she might confide.

He had done all this, had Gavin Brice. And, though he was not a vain man, yet he knew he had done it cleverly. But, somehow--even as he waited to see if the hour for full confidences were indeed ripe--he was not able to feel the thrill of exultation which should belong to the winner of a hard-fought duel. Instead, to his amazement, he was aware of a growing sense of shame, of disgust at having used such weapons against any woman,--especially against this girl whose whiteness of soul and of purpose he could no longer doubt.

Then, through the silence and above the soft lap-lap-lap of water against the idly drifting boat's side, Claire drew a deep breath. She threw back her drooping shoulders and sat up, facing the man. And in the dusk, Gavin could see the flash of resolve in her great eyes.

"Yes!" she said, impulsively. "Yes. I'll tell you. If it is wrong for me to tell, then let it be wrong. I'm sick of mystery and secrets and signals and suspense, and--oh, I'm sick of it all! And it's--it's splendid of you to want to help me, after what has happened to you through meeting me!

It's your right to know."

She paused for breath. And again Gavin wondered at his own inability to feel a single throb of gladness at having come so triumphantly to the end of this particular road. Glumly, he stared down at the vibrant little figure beside him.

"There is some of it I don't know, myself," she began. "And lately I've found myself wondering if all I really know is true, or whether they have been deceiving me about some of it.

I have no right to feel that way, I suppose, about my own brother. But he's so horribly under Rodney Hade's influence, and--"

Again, she paused, seeming to realize she was wandering from the point. And she made a fresh start.

"It all began as an adventure, a sort of game, more than in earnest," she said. "At least, looking back, that's the way it seems to me now. As a wonderfully exciting game. You see, everything down here was so thrillingly exciting and interesting to me, even then."

"I see."

"If you don't mind," she added, "I think I can make you understand it all the better, if you'll let me go back to the beginning. I'll make it as short as I can."

"Yes."

"I had been brought up in New York, except when we were in Europe or when I was away at school. My father and mother never let me see or know anything of real life. Dad was old, even as far back as I can remember. Mother was his second wife. Milo's mother was his first wife, and she died ever so long ago. Milo is twenty years older than I am. Milo came down here on a cruise, when he got out of college. And he fell in love with this part of the country. He persuaded Dad to buy him a farm here, and he has spent fifteen years in building it up to what it is now. He and my mother didn't didn't get on awfully well together. So Milo spent about all his time down here, and I hardly ever saw him. Then Dad and Mother died, within a day of each other, during the flu epidemic. And Milo came on, for the funeral, of course, and to wind up the estate. Then he wanted me to come down here and live with him. He said he was lonely. And I was still lonelier.

"I came here. And I've been here ever since. It is a part of the world that throws a charm around every one who stays long enough under its spell. And I grew to loving it as much as Milo did. We had a beautiful life here, he and I and the cordial, lovable people who became our friends. It was last spring that Rodney Hade came to see us. Milo had known him, slightly, down here, years ago. He came back here--n.o.body knows from where, and rented a house, the other side of Coconut Grove, and brought his yacht down to Miami Harbor.

Almost right away, he seemed to gain the queerest influence over Milo. It was almost like hypnotism. And yet, I don't altogether wonder. He has an odd sort of fascination about him. Even when he is discussing his snakes."

"His snakes?"

"He has three rooms in his house fitted up as a reptile zoo.

He collects them from everywhere. He says--and he seems to believe it--that they won't hurt him and that he can handle them as safely as if they were kittens. Just like that man they used to have in the post office up at Orlando, who used to sit with his arms full of rattlesnakes and moccasins, and pet them."

"Yes," said Gavin, absentmindedly, as he struggled against an almost overmastering impulse which was gripping him. "I remember. But at last one of his pets killed him. He--"

"How did you know?" she asked, surprised. "How in the world should a newcomer from the North know about--"

"Oh, I read it in a Florida dispatch to one of the New York papers," he said, impatient at his own blunder. "And it was such a strange story it stuck in my memory. It--"

"Well," resumed Claire, "I think I've made you understand the simple and natural things that led up to it all. And now, I'll tell you everything, at least everything I know about it. It's--it's a gruesome sort of story, and--and I've grown to hate it all so!" She quivered. Then, squaring her young shoulders again, she continued:

"I don't ask you to believe what I'm going to tell you. But it's all true. It began this way:

"One night, six months ago, as Milo and I were sitting on the veranda, we heard a scream--a hideous sound it was--from the mangrove swamp. And a queer creature in drippy white came crawling out of--"

"Wait!"

Brice's monosyllable smashed into the current of her scarce-started narrative with the jarring suddenness of a pistol shot. She stared up at him in amaze. For, seen through the starlight, his face was working strangely. And his voice was vibrant with some mighty emotion.

"Wait!" he repeated. "You shan't go on. You shan't tell me the rest. I'm a fool. For I'm throwing away the best chance that could have come to me. I'm throwing it away with my eyes open, and because I'm a fool."

"I--I don't understand," she faltered, bewildered.

"No," he said roughly. "You don't understand. That's just why I can't let you go on. And, because I'm a fool, I can't play out this hand, where every card is mine. I'll despise myself, always, for this, I suppose. And it's a certainty that I'll be despised. It means an end to a career I found tremendously interesting. I didn't need the money it brought.

But I--"

"What in the world are you talking about?" she demanded, drawing a little away from him. "I--"

"Listen," he interrupted. "A lot of men, in my line and in others, have come a cropper in their careers, because of some woman. But I'm the first to come such a cropper on account of a woman with a white soul and the eyes of a child,--a woman I scarcely know, and who has no interest in me. But, to-night, I shall telegraph my resignation. Some saner man can take charge. There are enough of our men ma.s.sed in this vicinity to choose from. I'm going to get out of Florida and leave the game to play itself to an end, without me. I'm an idiot to do it. But I'd be worse than an idiot to let you trust me and let you tell me things that would wreck your half-brother and bring sorrow and shame to you. I'm through! And I can't even be sorry."

"Mr. Brice," she said, gently, "I'm afraid your terrible experiences, this afternoon and last evening, have unsettled your mind, a little. Just sit still there, and rest. I am going to run the boat to sh.o.r.e and--"

"You're right," he laughed, ruefully, as he made way for her to start the engine. "My experiences have 'unsettled' my mind. And now that I've spoiled my own game, I'll tell you the rest--as much of it as I have a right to. It doesn't matter, any longer. Hade knows--or at least suspects.