“He is all that—the dear old ‘padre.’ I don’t mean on this account,” explained Eustace. “But he liked your brother very much, as, in fact, we all did.”
Listening to, and sympathising with, Nellie’s trouble, Eustace blessed the luck which had brought him that way this morning. She looked so pretty and engaging as, the first feeling of shyness over, she talked to him as freely as if she had known him all her life. And time went by so quickly that somehow or other he clean forgot about the tempting day’s rabbit-shooting which awaited him at the goal whither his steps had been tending, and where two other ardent sportsmen were heartily anathematising “that lazy beggar, Ingelow, who seemed to think it was all the same, by George! if they didn’t begin to put in the ferrets till the afternoon.” Forgot everything, except that a sweetly pretty girl, with the most delicious blue eyes and brown wavy hair, was pouring her grief into his sympathising ear, and that he was pledging himself again and again to move heaven and earth to find the object of that grief.
Suddenly a sound of approaching footsteps, Nellie looked up, and turned as white as a sheet.
“Go—go!” she cried. “Quick! It’s papa.”
“Whoever it is it’s too late to go, for he’ll have seen me,” replied Eustace quietly, but fearlessly. “But keep perfectly cool, and don’t show any sign of alarm. It isn’t your father.”
Nor was it. It was, however, a personage who might, though vicariously, prove not much less formidable.
“Good-morning, sir. But it’ll be raining presently, I’m thinking!” said Johnston, the head-gardener, as he walked by the pair. And although his tone was civil, even good-natured, Eustace was not slow to mark a look of exultant malice in the Scot’s cunning features. His turn had come now.
“Oh, Mr Ingelow!” cried Nellie aghast, when the man had gone by. “What if Johnston were to let out to papa, that—that he had—seen you here?”
“But he won’t. Why should he?” said Eustace gaily. “No fear of that, I should think. And what a trespasser I am—here, with a gun.” All the same he was very uneasy in his own mind, remembering the fellow’s parting shot in the Rectory garden.
“I think I had better go in,” said Nellie, who was really frightened. “Good-bye, Mr Ingelow. Thank you very, very much for your kindness to-day. And you will let me know when you hear anything of poor Roland.”