u everywhere, my dear," he said to Una.
"Marshal Beresford is anxious to pay you his respects before he leaves,
and you have been so hedged about by gallants all the evening that
it's devil a chance he's had of approaching you." There was a certain
constraint in his voice, for a man may not recover instantly from such
feelings as those which had fetched him hot-foot down that path at sight
of those two figures sitting so close and intimate, the young man's arm
so proprietorialy about the lady's shoulders--as it seemed.

Lady O'Moy sprang up at once, with a little silvery laugh that was
singularly care-free; for had not Tremayne lifted the burden entirely
from her shoulders?

"You should have married a dowd," she mocked him. "Then you'd have found
her more easily accessible."

"Instead of finding her dallying in the moonlight with my secretary,"
he rallied back between good and ill humour. And he turned to Tremayne:
"Damned indiscreet of you, Ned," he added more severely. "Suppose you
had been seen by any of the scandalmongering old wives of the garrison?
A nice thing for Una and a nice thing for me, begad, to be made the
subject of fly-blown talk over the tea-cups."

Tremayne accepted the rebuke in the friendly spirit in which it appeared
to be conveyed. "Sorry, O'Moy," he said. "You're quite right. We should
have thought of it. Everybody isn't to know what our relations are." And
again he was so manifestly honest and so completely at his ease that it
was impossible to harbour any thought of evil, and O'Moy felt again the
glow of shame of suspicions so utterly unworthy and dishonouring.

CHAPTER VIII. THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

In a small room of Count Redondo's palace, a room that had been set
apart for cards, sat three men about a card-table. They were Count
Samoval, the elderly Marquis of Minas, lean, bald and vulturine of
aspect, with a deep-set eye that glared fiercely through a single
eyeglass rimmed in tortoise-shell, and a gentleman still on the fair
side of middle age, with a clear-cut face and iron-grey hair, who wore
the dark green uniform of a major of Cacadores.

Considering his Portuguese uniform, it is odd that the low-toned,
earnest conversation amongst them should have been conducted in French.

There were cards on the table; but there was no pretence of play. You
might have conceived them a group of players who, wearied of their game,
had relinquished it for conversation. They were the o