"Thank you," said she, and the old friendliness returned to her face. "We could not keep him. From the day that he heard of the rising in Northumberland, he has been in a fever. And he meant to go without our knowing. You are familiar with his secrecies;" she gave a little pathetical laugh. "He was ever scouring his pistols and guns in the corner when he thought we should not see him. He meant to go. I feared that he would slip from the house one night, like——" She caught herself up sharply, with half a glance at me. "So it seemed best to encourage him to go openly. Besides," she added slowly, bending her head a little over her horse's back—she seemed to be carefully examining the snaffle—"I thought it not unlikely that we should find you here."
"Ah, you had that thought in your mind?" I cried, feeling my heart pulse within me. "Indeed, it turns my promise to a sacred obligation. What one man can do to keep your father safe, believe it, shall be done by me." I was looking towards the receding army as I spoke, and a new thought struck me. "You would have let me go," I exclaimed in reproach, "without a hint of your request, had I not come back to you?"
She coloured for an instant, but instead of answering the question—
"I knew you would come——" she began, and broke off suddenly. "Yes, why did you come back?" she asked in a voice of indifferent curiosity.
"I had not said good-bye to you. You gave me no chance, and it hurt me to part from you that way."
"But I thought that was your custom," she replied, with some touch of resentment underneath the carelessness. "It would not have been the first time. You were careful not to leave a light burning in the stables the last night you quitted Applegarth."
"I saw that you knew."
"Yes," said she, hurriedly. "I heard your foot upon the gravel."
"But I said good-bye to the candle in your window all that night, until the morning broke from a shoulder of High Stile. I had to go. There were reasons."
She interrupted me again in a great hurry, and with so complete a change of manner that I wondered for a moment whether Mary Tyson had related to her the conversation at the gate of the garden.