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Updated: June 9, 2025
There was no need to go farther. Lady O'Moy, white and tearful, was discovered on the threshold. Sir Terence stood aside, holding the door for her, his face very grim. She came in slowly, looking from one to another with her troubled glance, and finally accepting the chair that Captain Tremayne made haste to offer her.
"I am without information on that point," O'Moy admitted; "no doubt because the officer in question is missing, as you will also have been informed. But I have no reason to doubt that, whatever his business may have been, it was concerned with the interests which are common alike to the British and the Portuguese nation." "That is a charitable assumption, Sir Terence."
She waited until the obedient and discreet Miss Armytage had passed from view into the wing that contained the adjutant's private quarters, then sinking limp and nerveless to her chair: "Now," she bade them, "please tell me." And O'Moy, with a sigh of regret for the lie so laboriously concocted which would never now be uttered, delivered himself huskily of the hideous truth.
"That," said O'Moy, who would never have kept his temper in control but for the pleasant consciousness that he held a hand of trumps with which he would' presently overwhelm this representative of the Portuguese Government, "that is an opinion for which the Council may presently like to apologise, admitting its entire falsehood." Senhor Forjas started as if he had been stung.
"Very fit and proper that he should put right in the eyes of the world the reputation you have damaged for his sake, Sylvia. I suppose you're to be married." They moved apart, and each stared at O'Moy Sylvia in cold anger, Tremayne in chagrin. "You see, Sylvia," the captain cried, at this voicing of the world's opinion he feared so much on her behalf.
If it vexed him to have been caught by a husband notoriously jealous in an attitude not altogether uncompromising, Samoval betrayed no sign of it. With smooth self-possession he hailed O'Moy: "General, you come in time to enable me to take my leave of you. I was on the point of going." "So I perceived," said O'Moy tartly. He had almost said: "So I had hoped."
And then she herself was feverishly assuring Colonel Grant that she had seen nothing at all, that she had heard a cry and had come out on to the balcony to see what was happening. "And was Captain Tremayne here when you came out?" asked O'Moy, the deadly jester. "Ye-es," she faltered. "I was only a moment or two before yourself."
But the bowing line of officers whose backs were towards him effectively barred his progress, and before they had broken up that formation her ladyship and her cavalier were out of sight, lost in the moving crowd. The marshal laughed good-humouredly. "The infallible reward of patience," said he. And O'Moy laughed with him. But the next moment he was scowling at what he overheard.
"It's that damned fool Richard," growled O'Moy. "He's broken out again." The captain looked relieved. "And is that all?" O'Moy looked at him, white-faced, and in his blue eyes a blaze of that swift passion that had made his name a byword in the army. "All?" he roared. "You'll say it's enough, by God, when you hear what the fool's been at this time. Violation of a nunnery, no less."
In the reaction of self-contempt, and in a curious surge of pride almost as perverse as his humility, O'Moy had adopted her suggestion, and thereafter in the past-three months, that is to say the unreasonable devil of O'Moy's jealousy had slept, almost forgotten.
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