Hearing the sound of clattering hoofs and gay laughing voices rapidly approaching, he held her hand in his but for one second and dropped it. Then the syce hurrying forward with the pony, he mounted and galloped off. No—he never looked back.
Honor stood for a moment as in a sort of trance; then she turned and leaned against the palings, which bordered a pine-forest sloping to the road. The gay riding party cantering past, rather wondered to see Miss Gordon without her hat, evidently looking for something in the wood. They had no time to stop and ask her what it was that she had lost?
They would have been rather astonished if they could have learnt the truth—that she had just that moment lost her lover,—and for ever. They might have guessed at a tragedy of the kind, had they seen her white set face, and the expression of the clenched hands that grasped the palings. But they did not see, nor did they suspect any connection between Miss Gordon looking into a wood, and a momentary vision of a young fellow on a bay pony, who had flashed up a side path, before they could identify either man or beast.
Honor, with a perfectly colourless face, walked up to her aunt, who was still softly sobbing in the drawing-room, and leaning her hand upon her shoulder, said in a strange emotionless voice—
“It is all over, auntie. We have said good-bye for ever.”
She stooped and kissed her, and went and shut herself up in her own room, from which she did not emerge for several hours; and then the girl who did appear was a different Honor Gordon.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE SON AND THE HEIR.
“I never expected to see you again,” cried Fernandez, as with a napkin over his arm, and a lamp held above his round black head, he surveyed Jervis, who was stiffly dismounting from his pony.
“Why not?” inquired the traveller, as he came up the steps.
“Every why not, my dear fellow. If I had been in your shoes, you’d never have seen me again. I’d have taken my jawab. You are a young man in a thousand.” And he patted him affectionately on the shoulder.