“It was only talk, Roland, wasn’t it?” she urged, clinging to him. “Darling, tell me that he has no power to harm you. He has not—has he?”
As a matter of fact the threat had momentarily struck him with a pang of the old alarm. Momentarily, because, invoking reason to his aid, he decided that the rascally Scot had got his suspicions at second-hand from Gipsy Steve when the precious pair were in their cups. The suspicions of these two scoundrels were harmless. Only if he flinched might they become dangerous. So he had acted with decision, as we have seen.
“Not the slightest?” he answered reassuringly. “If he has I’ll give him every opportunity of putting it to the test. Off he goes this very evening, bag and baggage.”
Chapter Forty.
The Ban Again.
The Cranston party had organised a picnic to Durnley Castle.
It was May—bright, flowery, laughing May—neither spring nor summer, but something of both. The sun’s rays were not too powerful this glorious afternoon, as with a delicious warmth they poured down upon the fields studded with golden buttercups and delicate bluebells, and distilled the sweet scent from blossoming hawthorn hedges, where the linnet and grey-backed shrike sat patiently upon their eggs, secure in the recesses of their thorny covert. Fair to the eye were the velvety coppices, with their newly-donned mantles of bright green, whence issued the soft coo of the turtle-dove, and the flap of the cushat’s wing among the branches. Then, too, how light-hearted the joyous, oft-repeated note of the cuckoo, sounding over the pleasant landscape!
Durnley Castle was a fine ruin, with massive ivy-grown walls still rising to a considerable height; and standing as it did on a lofty headland, the views of the coast obtained from it were superb. Otherwise it was much like other ruins of the kind, its scarp being literally strewn with bits of sandwich paper, ancient and modern, broken bottles, and similar relics of generations of picnic parties. It was under the care of a clan of cottagers, whose thatch might be detected among the trees hard by, which care mainly consisted in taking precious good care to collect sixpences, but stopped short at clearing away the abominable rubbish aforesaid.