“Chide me!” Colonel Harcourt thrust his handsome presence to the front. “It would be sweet to be chidden by those rosy lips. The next best thing, I declare, to being——” He paused, let his eye finish the phrase with bold suggestion, and then concluded humourously, with an almost farcical hesitation and change of tone: “praised by them!”
There was a new freedom in his manner and Ellinor was prompt to feel it. She remembered as with a dim sense of nightmare those burning glances, unnoticed then, which had fixed her last night. What had she done to forfeit the respect even of this hitherto courteous and kindly gentleman? She stepped back as he approached and looked at him icily.
“Whether you opened the gate or found it opened, I must repeat, Colonel Harcourt, that your presence here is a breach of courtesy—to your host and to me.”
Smiling, Colonel Harcourt opened his mouth to speak. But Lady Lochore intervened.
“How well you know my brother’s mind, Mrs. Marvel!” she jeered. “But you see, even men change their minds sometimes. Colonel Harcourt, show the lady with whose key you opened the gate.”
“Sir David’s own key,” confirmed the colonel blandly, as he held it aloft. “We are not quite the trespassers you think.”
“David gave it to you?” Her eyes were dark with trouble as she said the words, less as a question than as if she were setting forth her own grief. Harcourt did not answer for a moment. Then, slipping the key into his pocket with a laugh:
“Gave?” he cried. “Gave is hardly the word. He abandoned it to me. People change their minds, as my lady says. Sir David may once have wished to keep this curious spot sacred to himself——”
“And to Mistress Marvel, but now you may all eat the forbidden fruit!” cried Lady Lochore, with a glance first at the three men and then at Ellinor. “Sir David has at last found that it is not worth keeping to himself.”
Herrick, quick to perceive that Ellinor was being baited yet unable to gather the clue to the purpose which seemed to underlie her tormentor’s words, now came forward.