Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/223

 "Yes," Sir Ian answered.

"We spoil the place for you!"

"You know that isn't the reason," he said, "and it would be cruel to pretend you think it is. But I mustn't stop here, now you have come. Terry," (he seemed to speak her name unconsciously, and then start at the sound of it in his own voice)—"that old fox Smedley has taken it upon himself to play detective, and is following me about, delighting in the fact that I know what he's after. He wears a sort of defiant 'Cat may look at a King air,' if I run across him in a railway-station or a hotel corridor. I've dodged him, or he's letting me hope I have, since Grenoble, but he may turn up at any time. I don't know what his object is, unless to annoy me, and yet"

"I know," said Terry, flushing deeply, but with eyes frank and unashamed. "No doubt he made it his business to find out that I was coming abroad too, and he wanted to see if"

"Probably," Sir Ian drily asserted, as she paused. "Well he mustn't see what he wants to see. By Jove, shooting would be too good for a beast like that!" When these words had broken from him, Sir Ian winced. After such a tragedy as had just darkened his life, a man does not speak lightly of shooting. For a second he had forgotten; but now he was sorely conscious again of the weight of his burden.