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In the eyes staring up at him was a hunger which even David Drennen could not misread. "Tell me," she said after a little, her voice more quiet than it had been. "Do you love Ygerne Bellaire, Dave?" "Yes," he answered quietly. "You fool!" she cried at him. "Why is a man always blind to what another woman can see so plainly? Don't you know what she is?"
The words were purposely made audible, and during the rest of the meal, when Mrs. Thompson- Bellaire was not bitingly sarcastic to Lorelei, she was offensively patronizing.
"Appearances would indicate," ran a little initialled note at the end of the report, "that Bondaine and Lemarc had been in some way trying to coerce Miss Bellaire and that she had shot her way out of the discussion. Throughout the winter Drennen pressed the search as his instinct or some chance hint directed.
Drennen had more money than he needed; he had an assured income from the newly rediscovered Golden Girl; there were still other mines in the world for the man who could find them; and he had merely done for Ygerne Bellaire the first thing she had asked of him. In Drennen's eyes, in this intoxicated mood, it seemed a very little thing.
"Where's Bellaire, Matty?" she demanded. "Off south," replied the woman, "right bearin' south." "By train?" "Yes, the same's walkin' or flying'," confirmed Matty. "Jest the same." "Then you can finish the story now, Matty," said Virginia presently. Matty settled back in her chair, closed her eyes, and began to hum. "How far'd I tell last night?" she queried, blinking.
For a moment she seemed to hesitate; then she spoke quietly, her eyes always intent upon his. "So, if you don't want to know what drove me from New Orleans you do want to know what brought me here? I think that perhaps you could guess if you had heard as much as other men know about my grandfather, Bellaire le Beau Diable, as men called him.
"Where would we go?" he asked, without interest. "Anywhere to get away from Bellaire for a season." "We might consider it," he replied reluctantly. Then he fell to thinking of a blue-eyed girl, of the letter, that puzzling letter she had sent him. When he could bear his thoughts no longer, he got up and walked away under the trees, and Molly allowed him to go.
Bondaine and her two daughters were away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hot dispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shot her guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it not been for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the household servants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleans and had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.
He had grown to see as a miraculous manifestation of this law even the fact that he and Ygerne Bellaire had been born in the same generation. . . . Stern-minded men of science, whose creed is to doubt all things until they are proven in such wise as an objective brain can accept them as incontrovertible, see no miracle in the fact that a certain female moth, left alone upon a mountain top, will draw to herself a male mate from mountainous miles away.
There they sought and found exiles of their own station, making about them a circle as brilliant as Louis's court. And here Bellaire prospered until after my father was born. Then there came other trouble, a game in Paul Bellaire's own home over which there were hot dispute and pistol shots.
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