"But she has you, Miss Armytage."

"Me?" Miss Armytage spoke deprecatingly. "I don't think I am a very able or experienced guide. Besides, even such as I am, she may not have me very long now. I had letters from home this morning. Father is not very well, and mother writes that he misses me. I am thinking of returning soon."

"But--but you have only just come!"

She brightened and laughed at the dismay in his voice. "Indeed, I have been here six weeks." She looked out over the shimmering moonlit waters of the Tagus and the shadowy, ghostly ships of the British fleet that rode at anchor there, and her eyes were wistful. Her fingers, with that little gesture peculiar to her in moments of constraint, were again entwining themselves in her rope of pearls. "Yes," she said almost musingly, "I think I must be going soon."

He was dismayed. He realised that the moment for action had come. His heart was sounding the charge within him. And then that cursed rope of pearls, emblem of the wealth and luxury in which she had been nurtured, stood like an impa.s.sable abattis across his path.

"You--you will be glad to go, of course?" he suggested.

"Hardly that. It has been very pleasant here." She sighed.

"We shall miss you very much," he said gloomily. "The house at Monsanto will not be the same when you are gone. Una will be lost and desolate without you."

"It occurs to me sometimes," she said slowly, "that the people about Una think too much of Una and too little of themselves."

It was a cryptic speech. In another it might have signified a spitefulness unthinkable in Sylvia Armytage; therefore it puzzled him very deeply. He stood silent, wondering what precisely she might mean, and thus in silence they continued for a spell. Then slowly she turned and the blaze of light from the windows fell about her irradiantly.

She was rather pale, and her eyes were of a suspiciously excessive brightness. And again she made use of the phrase:

"Una will be waiting for you."

Yet, as before, he stood silent and immovable, considering her, questioning himself, searching her face and his own soul. All he saw was that rope of shimmering pearls.

"And after all, as yourself suggested, it is possible that others may be waiting for me," she added presently.

Instantly he was crestfallen and contrite. "I sincerely beg your pardon, Miss Armytage," and with a pang of which his imperturbable exterior gave no hint he proffered her his arm.

She took it, barely touching it with her finger-tips, and they re-entered the ante-room.

"When do you think that you will be leaving?" he asked her gently.

There was a note of harshness in the voice that answered him.

"I don't know yet. But very soon. The sooner the better, I think."

And then the sleek and courtly Samoval, detaching from, seeming to materialise out of, the glittering throng they had entered, was bowing low before her, claiming her attention. Knowing her feelings, Tremayne would not have relinquished her, but to his infinite amazement she herself slipped her fingers from his scarlet sleeve, to place them upon the black one that Samoval was gracefully proffering, and greeted Samoval with a gay raillery as oddly in contrast with her grave demeanour towards the captain as with her recent avowal of detestation for the Count.

Stricken and half angry, Tremayne stood looking after them as they receded towards the ballroom. To increase his chagrin came a laugh from Miss Armytage, sharp and rather strident, floating towards him, and Miss Armytage's laugh was wont to be low and restrained. Samoval, no doubt, had resources to amuse a woman--even a woman who instinctively, disliked him--resources of which Captain Tremayne himself knew nothing.

And then some one tapped him on the shoulder. A very tall, hawk-faced man in a scarlet coat and tightly strapped blue trousers stood beside him. It was Colquhoun Grant, the ablest intelligence officer in Wellington's service.

"Why, Colonel!" cried Tremayne, holding out his hand. "I didn't know you were in Lisbon."

"I arrived only this afternoon." The keen eyes flashed after the disappearing figures of Sylvia and her cavalier. "Tell me, what is the name of the irresistible gallant who has so lightly ravished you of your quite delicious companion?"

"Count Samoval," said Tremayne shortly.

Grant's face remained inscrutable. "Really!" he said softly. "So that is Jeronymo de Samoval, eh? How very interesting. A great supporter of the British policy; therefore an altruist, since himself he is a sufferer by it; and I hear that he has become a great friend of O'Moy's."

"He is at Monsanto a good deal certainly," Tremayne admitted.

"Most interesting." Grant was slowly nodding, and a faint smile curled his thin, sensitive lips. "But I'm keeping you, Tremayne, and no doubt you would be dancing. I shall perhaps see you to-morrow. I shall be coming up to Monsanto."

And with a wave of the hand he pa.s.sed on and was gone.

CHAPTER VII. THE ALLY

Tremayne elbowed his way through the gorgeous crowd, exchanging greetings here and there as he went, and so reached the ballroom during a pause in the dancing. He looked round for Lady O'Moy, but he could see her nowhere, and would never have found her had not Carruthers pointed out a knot of officers and a.s.sured him that the lady was in the heart of it and in imminent peril of being suffocated.

Thither the captain bent his steps, looking neither to right nor left in his singleness of purpose. Thus it happened that he saw neither O'Moy, who had just arrived, nor the ma.s.sive, decorated bulk of Marshal Beresford, with whom the adjutant stood in conversation on the skirts of the throng that so a.s.siduously worshipped at her ladyship's shrine.

Captain Tremayne went through the group with all a sapper's skill at piercing obstacles, and so came face to face with the lady of his quest.

Seeing her so radiant now, with sparkling eyes and ready laugh, it was difficult to conceive her haunted by any such anxieties as Miss Armytage had mentioned. Yet the moment she perceived him, as if his presence acted as a reminder to lift her out of the delicious present, something of her gaiety underwent eclipse.

Child of impulse that she was, she gave no thought to her action and the construction it might possibly bear in the minds of men chagrined and slighted.

"Why, Ned," she cried, "you have kept me waiting." And with a complete and charming ignoring of the claims of all who had been before him, and who were warring there for precedence of one another, she took his arm in token that she yielded herself to him before even the honour was so much as solicited.

With nods and smiles to right and left--a queen dismissing her court--she pa.s.sed on the captain's arm through the little crowd that gave way before her dismayed and intrigued, and so away.

O'Moy, who had been awaiting a favourable moment to present the marshal by the marshal's own request, attempted to thrust forward now with Beresford at his side. But the bowing line of officers whose backs were towards him effectively barred his progress, and before they had broken up that formation her ladyship and her cavalier were out of sight, lost in the moving crowd.

The marshal laughed good-humouredly. "The infallible reward of patience," said he. And O'Moy laughed with him. But the next moment he was scowling at what he overheard.

"On my soul, that was impudence!" an Irish infantryman had protested.

"Have you ever heard," quoth a heavy dragoon, who was also a heavy jester, "that in heaven the last shall be first? If you pay court to an angel you must submit to celestial customs."

"And bedad," rejoined the infantryman, "as there's no marryin' in heaven ye've got to make the best of it with other men's wives. Sure it's a great success that fellow should be in paradise. Did ye remark the way she melted to him beauty swooning at the sight of temptation! Bad luck to him! Who is he at all?"

They dispersed laughing and followed by O'Moy's scowling eyes. It annoyed him that his wife's thoughtless conduct should render her the b.u.t.t of such jests as these, and perhaps a subject for lewd gossip. He would speak to her about it later. Meanwhile the marshal had linked arms with him.

"Since the privilege must be postponed," said he, "suppose that we seek supper. I have always found that a man can best heal in his stomach the wounds taken by his heart." His fleshy bulk afforded a certain prima-facie confirmation of the dictum.

With a roll more suggestive of the quarter-deck than the saddle, the great man bore off O'Moy in quest of material consolation. Yet as they went the adjutant's eyes raked the ballroom in quest of his wife.

That quest, however, was unsuccessful, for his wife was already in the garden.

"I want to talk to you most urgently, Ned. Take me somewhere where we can be quite private," she had begged the captain. "Somewhere where there is no danger of being overheard."

Her agitation, now uncontrolled, suggested to Tremayne that the matter might be far more serious and urgent than Miss Armytage had represented it. He thought first of the balcony where he had lately been. But then the balcony opened immediately from the ante-room and was likely at any moment to be invaded. So, since the night was soft and warm, he preferred the garden. Her ladyship went to find a wrap, then arm in arm they pa.s.sed out, and were lost in the shadows of an avenue of palm-trees.

"It is about d.i.c.k," she said breathlessly.

"I know--Miss Armytage told me."