estor, Mrs. Ricardo? Does he still call him his
old man of the soil?"

To her, at any rate, yes, he did! She did not think it was a thing he
talked about to everybody. But I had hoped it was an extinct folly,
since he had not mentioned it as yet to me. It was almost as though Mrs.
Ricardo had taken my old place. Did she discourage him as I had done?
She told me it was his latest ambition to lay the ghost. And I marvelled
at their intimacy, and wondered what that curmudgeon of a husband had to
say to it!

Yet it seemed natural enough that we should talk about Uvo Delavoye, as
I sat on another of the broken columns and lit a cigarette at Mrs.
Ricardo's suggestion. Uvo was one of those people who are the first of
bonds between their friends, a fruitful subject, a most human interest
in common. So I found myself speaking of him in my turn, with all
affection and yet some little freedom, to an almost complete stranger
who was drawing me on more deliberately than I saw.

"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"

"We _are_, and I hope we always shall be."

"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a
place!"

"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul
of the Estate to me."

Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my
mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she,
instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.

She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits
of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful
softening of her bold, flamboyant beauty; for I was not looking through
her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh
endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had
spoken without a certain intonation, which I had hardly noticed in her
speech until I missed it now.

"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both
had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise the terms
that they were on.

"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he
and I were to have kept to ourselves.

"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.

"Oh! I don't know."

"Which of them is such a secret?"

She was smiling now, but with obvious effort. Why this pressure on a
pointless point? And where _had_ I seen her before?

"Well, there was our very first adventure, fo