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.