“Good-bye, Mr. Renouard,” she said in a low voice, meaning to pass on; but there was such a look of entreaty in the blue gleam of his sunken eyes that after an imperceptible hesitation she laid her hand, which was ungloved, in his extended palm.
“Will you condescend to remember me?” he asked, while an emotion with which she was angry made her pale cheeks flush and her black eyes sparkle.
“This is a strange request for you to make,” she said, exaggerating the coldness of her tone.
“Is it? Impudent perhaps. Yet I am not so guilty as you think; and bear in mind that to me you can never make reparation.”
“Reparation? To you! It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings—and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride. No! I don’t want to remember you.”
Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and looking into her eyes with fearless despair—
“You’ll have to. I shall haunt you,” he said firmly.
Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it. Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.
The professor gave her a sidelong look—nothing more. But the professor’s sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look at the scene. She dropped it with a faint rattle.
“I’ve never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady,” she murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head. When, a moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the bungalow. She watched him go in—amazed—before she too left the soil of Malata.
Nobody disturbed Renouard in that room where he had shut himself in to breathe the evanescent perfume of her who for him was no more, till late in the afternoon when the half-caste was heard on the other side of the door.
He wanted the master to know that the trader _Janet_ was just entering the cove.
Renouard’s strong voice on his side of the door gave him most unexpected instructions. He was to pay off the boys with the cash in the office and arrange with the captain of the _Janet_ to take every worker away from Malata, returning them to their respective homes. An order on the Dunster firm would be given to him in payment.