Nanette glanced up at him, then down again--and shivered. But it was not because she was cold. Later, long after Nanette reluctantly had retired to her room, Jack was driven up from Funchal. We put him to bed without arousing anyone. “I’ll kill that slimy Da Cunha,” he declared thickly--and went to sleep. O’Shea surveyed him through the black-rimmed monocle. “I wonder if cats and pretty girls know how cruel they are?” he murmured. CHAPTER V. “IN FIVE MINUTES” The days wore on in that lotus-eaters’ paradise and I became an audience of one at a comedy designed to end in drama. There was a mystery that intrigued me vastly, and Ensleigh shared my curiosity. I could not imagine what the O’Shea was doing in Madeira. Da Cunha, palpably, had broken his journey to pursue Nanette. He positively haunted the hotel. I found it hard to believe that any such motive had inspired the Major. Ensleigh, with singular density, believed that Nanette was desperately infatuated with Da Cunha. I let him think so, and studied O’Shea. This strange man spent a large part of every day seated on his balcony, reading and writing. What he read or what he wrote, nobody knew. On occasions, he disappeared for hours: and no one knew where he went. It was queer, too, how many times Nanette strolled through the unfrequented part of the gardens below this balcony. Sometimes, but rarely, she would be alone, sometimes with Jack, more often with Da Cunha. But, always, she paused to glance in her mirror and powder her nose before she turned the corner. O’Shea, apparently, never noticed her. She would loiter around the bathing pool for hours in the morning and then suddenly throw off her robe and plunge into the sea with an easy, gliding dive like a young dryad. By this token I would know that O’Shea was sauntering down the steps. As she went in, Da Cunha and Jack would take the water like twin ducks. It was a miracle that they never tried to drown each other. O’Shea was a hard man to know; a lonely man. I was honestly proud of the fact that, little by little, he began to unbend to me, to grant me something like friendship. Occasionally he would join me on the cocktail terrace before lunch; and Nanette would ask him for matches and then run back to her mother, Ensleigh, Jack, Da Cunha, and the rest of the party who, amongst them, had enough matches to fire the building. Da Cunha was ceaselessly persevering in his endeavours to take her for drives, to take her fishing, and to dance with her to the strains of the Savoy band. Her mother negatived these plans. One day a very (apparently) indignant Nanette came across to where I was sitting with O’Shea. Jack followed. “Mr. Decies!” she burst out, “Gabriel wants to drive me out to a perfectly wonderful cliff. You lie on the edge and look down I don’t know how many hundred feet. Now, do _you_ see any earthly reason why I shouldn’t go?”