“Well, I went away! The girl was nothing to me,” he continued, looking not at Andria, but his half-smoked cigarette, so that, being a woman, she knew the girl had been everything to him and he nothing at all to her. “I came back again two years afterward--and I would not have known the place. The beautiful gardens were a tangle of creepers and weeds, the servants were all gone; the animals dead from starvation in their enclosures, all but the jaguars, that had broken loose and foraged for themselves. The man I found at last, ragged, thin, half-naked, and at first he would not speak to me; would only jabber at me without words.” “Then it was he!” she gasped. “Wait,” he nodded. “He was dumb, mad, but by and by his madness cleared a little and he told me what had happened. A stranger had come to the island; it was the old story that I need not dwell on”--reflecting hastily that it was one this woman probably knew from cover to cover. “She defied her father and ran away with him in a native boat. The man dismissed his servants and sat alone in his misery, and then heard that all his money, which had been in Brazilian bonds, was lost. He had not a penny to go and seek her through the world. He forgot, as I said, even his animals; almost forgot the use of his tongue, for only at intervals could I make him talk. Well, I was sorry for him!” What vindictive light lit his eyes to her sharp vision! “I liked the place and bought it for a toy, merely that the old man,” he continued slowly, “might be free to go and find his daughter who had deserted him.” The words were so gently spoken that it took all her cleverness to grasp their meaning. He had tried to set a madman on the track of the woman who had refused him and the man she had loved. Her eyes dilated with abhorrence, and yet his next words came so smoothly that she did not know what to think, and there was no one to tell her how cunningly he was mingling the truth with lies. “You would have pitied him, too; he had aged twenty years in the two that had passed. All he wanted was to find his daughter, yet when I gave him money he was too crazy to go. He threw it before my eyes into that pond you spoke of and went off to some lair in the woods with his jaguars.” He did not say how pitifully inadequate had been the purchase-money, nor that the lawful owner had been hunted away by men with guns. “In all the years I have been coming here I have only once had any evidence that he was alive”--that once would have made any other man long for the grave that he might hide his shame there!--“and Salome, who has been in charge here for six years, swore to me when I brought you that the place was safe. I am more shocked and horrified than I can say that you should have been in such danger from that lunatic and his animals. To-morrow, if you like, I will have my yacht’s crew scour the country till we find him.”