Violet Jacob > Flemington

TREACHERY 93
ground against which stood Archie’s conception
of Logie.
“ Diane ?” he exclaimed involuntarily.
James did not seem to hear him.
“Her eyes were like yours,” he went on.
“ When I saw you come into the light of the
house two evenings since, I thought of her.”
Neither spoke for a few moments; then James
went on again:
“ Fourteen years since the day I saw her last!
She looked out at me from the window with her
eyes full of tears. The window was filled with
flowers—she loved them. The tulips were there
again — crimson tulips — with her white face
behind them.”
Flemington listened with parted lips. His
personal feelings, his shrinking dread of being
drawn into the confidence of the man whom it
was his business to betray, were swallowed by a
wave of interest.
“ I was no more than a boy, with my head full
of cards and women and horses, and every devilry
under heaven, when I went to the house among
the canals. The Conte de Montdelys had built it,
for he lived in Holland a part of the year to grow
his tulips. He was a rich man—a hard, old, pinched
Frenchman—but his passion was tulip-growing,
and their cultivation was a new thing. It was
a great sight to see the gardens he had planned
at the water’s edge, with every colour reflected
from the beds, and the green-shuttered house in
the middle. Even the young men of the Brigade