These small amenities helped to pass the time, but Iris soon noted an air of suspense in the older woman's attitude. Though mindful of her guest's comfort, Luisa Gomez had ever a keen ear for external sounds. In all probability, she was disturbed by the distant reports of fire-arms, and it was a rare instance of innate good-breeding that she did not alarm her guest by calling attention to them. Iris, amid such novel surroundings, could not distinguish one noise from another. Night-birds screamed hideously in the trees without; a host of crickets kept up an incessant chorus in the undergrowth; the intermittent roaring of breakers on the rocks invaded the narrow creek. The medley puzzled Iris, but the island woman well knew that stirring events were being enacted on the other side of the hill. Her husband was there--he had, indeed, prepared a careful alibi since Marcel visited him--and wives are apt to feel worried if husbands are abroad when bullets are flying. So, while the girl, Manoela, was furtively appraising the clothing worn by Iris, and wondering how it came to pass that in some parts of the world there existed grand ladies who wore real cloth dresses, and lace embroidered under-skirts, and silk stockings, and shining leather boots--wore them, too, with as much careless ease as one draped one's self in coarse hempen skirt and shawl in Fernando Noronha--her mother was listening ever for hasty footsteps among the trailing vines. At last, with a muttered prayer, she went to the door, and unfastened the stout wooden staple that prevented intruders from entering unbidden. It was dark without. Dense black clouds veiled the moon, and a gust of wind moaned up the creek in presage of a tropical storm. Someone approached. "Is that you, Manoel?" asked Luisa Gomez in a hushed voice. There was no answer. The woman drew back. She would have closed the door, but a slim, active figure sprang across the threshold. She shrieked in terror. The new-comer was a Brazilian officer, one of those glittering beings whom she had seen lounging outside the Prindio[1] during her rare visits to the town. She was hoping to greet her Manoel, she half expected to find Marcel, but to be faced by an officer was the last thing she had thought of. In abject fear, she broke into a wild appeal to the Virgin; the officer merely laughed, though not loudly. "Be not afraid, senhora--I am a friend," he said with quiet confidence, and the fact that he addressed her so courteously was a wondrously soothing thing in itself. But he raised a fresh wave of dread in her soul when he peered into the cabin and spoke words she did not understand. "I think you are here, mademoiselle," he said in French. "I am come to share your retreat for a little while. Perchance by daybreak I may arrive at some plan. At present, you and I are in difficulties, is it not?"