“Oh, I understood!” He picked up the cigar again. “I felt just the same as you did. I knew the ghost that had stood so long between us was suddenly gone. He had moved out of the way, and you could see that I was there. For those next days you were—you were—I was full of hope. Then came word that Bella had broken her engagement.” “No, that the marriage was postponed.” He waited a moment, seemed about to speak, and then, instead of saying anything, with a sharp movement he threw his half-smoked cigar across the whitening silver of the path into the inky blotch the shrubbery made. Hildegarde’s eyes followed the flying red light till, against a tree trunk, it fell in a splash of sparks, and was swallowed up in shadow. “I shan’t forget,” Cheviot went on, still on that low restrained note, “the look in your face as you said: ‘I never thought they were suited to one another. It would never have done.’” “_Did_ I say that?” “Yes, and I looked up and I saw the ghost was there again, and presently I saw he wasn’t a ghost any longer, but a real man. An active expectation on your part—” “No, no.” The voice was less denial than beseeching. “Yes, a _plan_.” The hands that were gripping the wicker chair pulled her quickly to her feet. “Bella!” she called to the white flicker by the dial. “It’s getting late!” Cheviot stood up, too. “On your honor, Hildegarde—” Was it the moonlight blanched her, or was she indeed so white? His heart smote him—but, “On your honor can you deny it?” he demanded. “No,” she said, with sudden passion; “I don’t deny it.” And while her words should have steeled him, her voice brought a lump to his throat. “You mean,” he asked, huskily, “to wait till John Galbraith comes back?” “I know it’s quite mad—but there! A thing can take you like that. You _can’t_ change.” CHAPTER VIII With the precision of clockwork, every day of his life but Sundays, Nathaniel Mar walked down the main street of Valdivia to the bank. People who lived out of sight of the City Hall timepiece, set their watches by the appearance of the lame man with the stick. He never varied the route, any more than he altered his time, and both had been exactly the same for twenty-eight years. The other bank cashiers (few of them over thirty) said that, in their opinion, Mr. Mar had hung on quite long enough. They did not hesitate to add that his post would have fallen to a younger man years ago had Mar not been “a sort of relation.” Even so it was pretty steep that an old codger of sixty should be blocking up the way like that. A bank was no place for the superannuated, unless, of course, a man was a director. So acute was the hearing of the old codger (who was not yet sixty) that sotto-voce observations of this sort had, from time to time, reached his ears.