He
was even meeting his chief in a Kentucky woods to report. Tregar
admitted it. Why did he make me ridiculous at the Sherrill fete?
Purely because your eyes, Miss Westfall, were among those who watched
the indignity! Why is he driving about now in the music-machine to
mock me? Because having forced me from the road, he must needs see to
it that I do not return. When I do, he must be near at hand to report
to the Baron."
It was an artful network. Somehow, by virtue of the sinister skeleton
of facts underlying the velvet of his logic, it rang true. Diane, as
colorless as a flower, sat utterly silent, slender brown fingers
tightened against the palms of her hands.
Philip false! Philip a spy! Philip--almost a murderer! It could not
be!
Yet how insistently he had striven to force her to return to
civilization. Away from Ronador? It might be. How insistently the
Baron had urged him to linger in her camp! _To spy_? A great wave of
faintness swept over her. And there was Arcadia and the hay-camp and
the mildly impudent indignities--they all slipped accurately into place.
"I--I do not know!" she faltered at last in answer to his impetuous
pleading. "If you will not see me again until I may think it all out--"
But there was danger in waiting.
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