CHAPTER XXV
JAMES BLAKE DOES SOME EXPLAINING
They were all wary as they picked their way over the dry rutted road, but Nan more so than any of them. Even as James Blake felt responsible for her, so she felt responsible for her friends. There was small comfort now, in this lonely place, in the memory that the hunchback had told Bess that “these things had no part of her.” The accident, if such it might be called, on the hill just now, might very well have killed them all. Nan shuddered as she thought of how serious it might have been.
She peered this way and that into the tangle of bushes, grass, and thistles along the way, not knowing what she was looking for, but suspicious of every dark shadow.
Once, she looked gratefully up at the sky, the big moon, and the bright stars. She stumbled.
“No star gazing tonight,” Laura steadied her as she almost fell. “And what a moon, and what a sky, and what a shadow.” Laura pointed off to the right. “Look,” she whispered, half in fun, half in seriousness, “look, it’s like a man carrying something long in his hand.”
Nan’s glance followed Laura’s. The shadow—was it a man’s? She watched it. Was it moving? Then she breathed a deep sigh.
“Oh, Laura,” she chided her friend, “it’s only a tree! Will you stop teasing?”
“What was a tree?” Grace was on edge too, anxious to get inside, anxious to get away from this castle that had seemed so wonderful and so grand only a few hours ago.