"Dear Ruth," he pleaded, "what have I done to deserve this? Nothing
has happened to me that I will not tell you about. You have been
sitting here alone, fancying things. And I have news--great news!
Wait till you hear it."

"Go on," she said, simply. "Tell me everything. Begin at last
night."

He drew a little breath. It was, after all, a hard task, this, that
lay before him. Last night in his mind lay far enough back now, a
tangled web of disconnected episodes, linked together by a strangely
sweet emotional thread of sentiment. And the girl was watching his
face with every sense strained to catch his words and the meaning of
them. Vaguely he felt his danger, even from the first.

"Well, I got there in plenty of time," he began. "It was a beautiful
house, beautifully furnished and arranged. The people were queer,
not at all the sort I expected. Most of them seemed half foreign.
They were all very hard to place for such a respectable household as
Mr. Weatherley's should be."

"They were not really, then, Mr. Weatherley's friends?" she asked
quietly.

"As a matter of fact, they were not," he admitted. "That may have
had something to do with it. Mrs. Weatherley was a foreigner. She
came from a little island somewhere in the Mediterranean, and is
half Portuguese. Most of the people were there apparently by her
invitation. After dinner--such a dinner, Ruth--we played bridge.