“He isn’t in the house—but he will come—at dinner time, I guess,” Hilda spoke falteringly; her responsibility for the fugitive had been sweet; but, of course, he’d rather depend on Uncle Hank than on a small girl. “I’ll tell him about you when he comes, if you want me to,” she finished in a diminished voice.
There was a long silence between them, of a quality curiously embarrassing to Hilda. She felt ready to cry.
“Don’t you want me to tell Uncle Hank?” The boy looked bewildered.
“Is that your father’s brother? It isn’t any one that was with you coming out here?”
“He’s not my real uncle. It’s—you know—the manager.” She pointed to the sheet he still held. “He’d be just the same as papa. He’d do anything that papa would do.”
She broke off, noting how reluctant he seemed.
“I’ll not tell him—or anybody—if you’d rather not,” she said—and felt a guilty thrill of rapture as he responded:
“Well—for the present—maybe it would be better.”
Hilda tried to say something in answer to that, but somehow she couldn’t. A sort of disconsolate silence held the dim little chamber for a time. Then, just as the young fellow seemed about to speak again, this silence was broken startlingly by the jingling and thudding sounds of mounted men coming at a trot into the side yard, almost over their heads.
Instantly he reached forward and snuffed out the flame of the candle, and Hilda darted to the window and softly closed the shutter. As she came back on her way toward the passage, he groped out in the darkness and caught her hand, whispering: