The front door was in full view of the two men, who stood talking still just where she had first seen them. Andria ran to a disused side veranda and dropped down on a flower-bed. She wanted no one to see her, least of all Beryl from her window. She vanished into a tangle of overgrown bushes that Beryl called “the cat’s walk.” It cut the long road to the shore--that instinct told her the two men would take--at a right angle, and then ran parallel with it almost to the bay. There would be only a yard of impervious thicket between her and Raimond, if she got there in time to keep pace with him as he walked down the wide road. She did not care as she ran that it was nearly sunset, and that those teeth that had marked her neck might not be shaken off twice; she was not even breathless with her breakneck pace as she reached the angle of the path. She need only reach it, and whatever Raimond spoke of she would hear. “It’s low--contemptible!” she thought grimly, “but I don’t care. I must find out what I can, and----” the thought broke off unfinished. They were coming! White-faced over her black dress, the governess, “that excellent woman,” crouched behind the thicket of black cypress that was all that stood between her and the man who had been her husband. And, sharpened as her senses were, she never dreamed that two yards in front of her stood some one else, equally quiet, but from widely different motives. Raimond’s voice--how the woman’s heart burned in her at the rich note of it!--came on her ears. “You do hurry so unmercifully,” he was saying, “even down to that confounded ship of yours. Why wouldn’t you stay up there and sleep in a decent bed? Would you mind waiting one instant? My cigar’s gone out.” “Light it and be good enough to come on!” returned Egerton sharply. “It’s nearly sunset, and I have no desire to get fever. You can talk on the yacht.” “Oh, damn the yacht! That cook has the same menu every night. I wanted to see what your niggers would give us for dinner.” Andria heard a match struck, then another. “Take my box,” said Egerton irritably, “and if you must dawdle here, tell me what you mean to do. Isn’t the girl handsome enough for you, or--you’re not still thinking of that wretched woman in London!” said Egerton suspiciously. “Her? Oh, Lord, no! To be candid with you, I’d had enough of that; I wasn’t sorry to be well out of it. She was a good-looking woman, though! But I was tired of that house in Pont Street.” “You told me the truth when you said you weren’t fool enough to marry her?” In the dead silence the woman they spoke of heard the man she loved puffing at a cigar that would not draw; more interested in that than in the question on which her life seemed to hang. The screen of trees was thick, but if either man had seen the face behind it he would not have known the white mask of agony. Would Raimond never answer? When he did, it was with a laugh, and the governess, poor fool! winced.