“I go with you, sir,” said the man boldly. “Who knows what you may be riding to?”
“But, my good fellow—Sir David and the captain?”
“Sir, you come first. I have passed on your message.”
How could he gainsay him? It gave him a thrill of exquisite pleasure thus to experience a devotion that could so over-crow a constitutional timidity.
Silently together they padded it down the snowy drive, and in another minute were galloping along the road to Stockbridge.
High on the roof a figure watched their departure. The girl had scarcely moved since her master left her alone. But now her slender feet went crisp on the frost as she paced to and fro in the angle of the gables.
Once, suddenly, she paused at the limit of her path where the gutter-ledge, knee-high, formed the topmost courses of the house-front. And here she leapt upon the parapet, and stretched out her arms in a perilous manner into the dizzy whiteness of space.
“I know,” she said, nodding downwards fantastically. “But would you catch me if I jumped? It would hurt him to the heart to find me, when he comes back, lying there all crushed and broken.”
She seemed to listen, her face falling into shadow.
“To the heart,” she repeated, with a catch in her voice. “It would—it would, for all your secret laughing.”