A gleam of amusement lit up her eyes. “Poor Arsenio! He was in a difficulty—in a corner. And he’d been losing, his nerves were terribly wrong. There was the question of—me! And the question of Cragsfoot! And then Waldo came into it—oh, I’m sure of that. Those two men—it’s very odd. They seem fated to—to cross one another—to affect one another sometimes. I wonder whether——!” She broke off, knitting her brow. “He sounded most genuine in that outbreak of his when he mentioned Waldo. I think he was somehow realizing what Waldo would think and say, if he knew about Venice. Perhaps so, perhaps not! As for the rest of it——” “You think he wasn’t quite as angry as he pretended to be?” She seemed to reflect for a moment. “I didn’t say his anger was unreal, did I? I said it was childish. When a child runs heedlessly into something and hurts himself, he kicks the thing and tells his mother that it’s horrid. I was the thing, you see. Arsenio’s half a child.” Again she paused. “He’s also an actor. And he contrived, on the whole, a pretty effective exit!” “That you ever let him come back again is the wonder!” I cried. “No. It’s what happened before he came back that puzzles me,” she said. CHAPTER VII SELF-DEFENSE LUCINDA told me nothing about how “the end of Venice” struck or affected Mrs. Knyvett. Some bewilderment of that good lady may be conjectured; whether she wisely asked no questions or, asking them, received the sort of replies which the proverb indicates as the fate of questioners, I did not know. Nor, indeed, did I care—any more than I cared what had become of Mrs. Knyvett at that moment. (In fact, as I learned afterwards, she had quartered herself—it was her one talent!—on an old and wealthy spinster, and was living with her at Torquay.) My interest was where Lucinda’s was—centered in Lucinda herself. Her narrative jumped straight from Venice to Cragsfoot. She did not say anything of her feelings in the interval; she went on to what “puzzled” her—to the relations that came about between her and Waldo Rillington. To those, from the beginning and all through, Valdez and what he had been to her formed a background, and more than that, they were a factor and a contributory, just as Nina Frost was. But it was in that way she treated them. Waldo was now the leading figure; round him centered the main theme, the thing to be explained.