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Richard Turlington's voice was suddenly audible on deck exactly above them. "Graybrooke, I want to say a word to you about Launcelot Linzie." Natalie's first impulse was to fly to the door. Hearing Launce's name on Richard's lips, she checked herself. Something in Richard's tone roused in her the curiosity which suspends fear. She waited, with her hand in Launce's hand.
When she had got rid of them at last, she looked and behold Lord Winwood and Sir Joseph were the only occupants of the corner! Delaying one moment, to set the "virtuoso" thundering once more, Lady Winwood slipped out of the room and crossed the landing. At the entrance to the empty drawing-room she heard Turlington's voice, low and threatening, in the boudoir.
The man is floating on a hen-coop, and we have got nothing of the sort on board this pilot-boat." The one person present who happened to notice Richard Turlington's face when those words were pronounced was Launcelot Linzie.
This to the guest admitted on board on sufferance, and not one word of it addressed, even by chance, to the owner of the yacht! Richard Turlington's heavy eyebrows contracted with an unmistakable expression of pain.
The servant disappeared, and Natalie was in Launce's arms before she could breathe again. For one delicious moment she let her head lie on his breast; then she suddenly pushed him away from her. "Why do you come here? He will kill you if he finds you in the house. Where is he?" Launce knew even less of Turlington's movements than the servant. "Wherever he is, thank God, I am here before him!"
Richard had fortunately made no discoveries; and the matter might safely be trusted, all things considered, to rest where it was. Miss Lavinia might possibly have taken a less hopeful view of the circumstances, if she had known that one of the men-servants at Muswell Hill was in Richard Turlington's pay, and that this servant had seen Launce leave the grounds by the back-garden gate.
Turlington's mind, steady and slow in all its operations, set him a problem to be solved, on given conditions, as follows: "Launcelot Linzie is fifteen years younger than I am. Add to that, Launcelot Linzie is Natalie Graybrooke's cousin. Given those two advantages Query: Has he taken Natalie's fancy?"
Turlington's rugged face expressed a martyrdom of suppressed fury. Launce in the act of offering Natalie her fan smiled, with the cool superiority of a man who knew that he had won his advantage, and who triumphed in knowing it. "I forbid you to take your fan from that man's hands," said Turlington, speaking to Natalie, and pointing to Launce.
The man started, and drew his huge hairy hand across his eyes, as if in doubt whether he was waking or sleeping. "It's better than ten years, master, since you called me by my name. If I am Thomas Wildfang, what are you?" "Your captain, once more." Thomas Wildfang sat up on the side of the bed, and spoke his next words cautiously in Turlington's ear. "Another man in the way?" "Yes."
Was there treachery at work under the surface? and was the object to persuade weak Sir Joseph to reconsider his daughter's contemplated marriage in a sense favorable to Launce? Turlington's blind suspicion overleaped at a bound all the manifest improbabilities which forbade such a conclusion as this.
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