Arabella looked up quickly.
“Oh, nothing! Captain Howard is in fine health and spirits,” Raymond hastened to stipulate.
“Then take time to sit down, Mr. Raymond,” Arabella said, for Mrs. Annandale had malevolently left him standing. “What brought you back?”
“The sight of the burning granary,” said Raymond, sinking into a chair with a goodly clatter of his warlike paraphernalia. “We had made fair headway when we met the storm, and the wind scattered the pettiaugres and drove us ashore. We went into an inlet where a ravine ran down the mountain-side, but the water rose and backed up till we took to the rocks, and emerging upon a high pinnacle commanding the face of the country I spied the bonfire you had started here.”
“Did you hear the guns?” Mervyn asked, quietly. He had no hope to delude the ladies with the idea that he had ordered the protective firing. But if Raymond had heard the circumstance of his inopportune seclusion it might foster a doubt in his mind.
Arabella noted that jovial widening of the pupils of Raymond’s eyes, an expression as hilarious as a laugh. But he said gravely that at the distance they had not discriminated between the discharge of the cannon and of the thunder.
“Captain Howard was not very uneasy about the Cherokees; he thought the fire was kindled by lightning, and at all events the main part of our force was here. But he sent me to bring certain intelligence, and as I am to rejoin him before dawn”—he was rising—“you will not, Mrs. Annandale, tempt me beyond my strength.”
He looked down at her with so sarcastic a gleam in his eyes that for once she was out of countenance.
“Hoity—toity,” she exclaimed, “we sharpen our wits in the pettiaugres.”
The glove was mended. Mervyn could not judge whether it were a mere façon de parler, or whether the girl were a coquette at heart, or whether Raymond had won upon her predilections, but he was seriously disturbed and displeased when, with a pretty gesture of significance, she cast it upon the table.