"Will you call upon me then?"
"Yes."
The yelling of the False Faces burst forth much nearer in the wood.
"Please go, Master Ormerod," she begged. "If I am not overtaken, this mask will protect me as far as the chapel, where my own clothes are awaiting me. They dare not enter there."
I captured her hand again and carried it to my lips.
"My name is Harry," I answered. "And I have never forgotten the song in the cabin of the New Venture."
"Thank you, Harry," she returned with a trill of elfin laughter. "And I do assure you I know other songs."
With that she was gone. Yet I had a feeling I had never known before that she was still with me, and I stepped into the water with joy in my heart.
A score of paces down the bank I found Ta-wan-ne-ars, and we crouched under the pendant branches of a willow to see what would happen, muskets primed and ready.
The yelling in the wood increased in volume as the False Faces followed the course we had taken by broken branches and footprints in the pinemold. A misshapen figure with the head of some fabled beast squattered into the trail and galloped around, nose to ground like a hound seeking a lost scent. In a moment the ugly head was lifted, and a howl of satisfaction greeted the other monstrous shapes which joined it. The whole pack gave tongue and vanished up the trail after Marjory.