"The lantern will be out of sight," Ruth pouted. "Shall we follow them?"
"To tell you the truth I distrust that guide," said Jardine. With women he seldom resorted to candid speech, and an appeal to their intelligence and judgment. But he resolved to be frank now, though he marked how her cheek paled, how her eyes dilated. "I think that if he has any sinister intentions our remaining on guard here, so to speak, will be a check upon them. They will be rendered impracticable for fear of our report of the entrance of the party into the cave, and their failure or delay to return. Now I propose that we wait here, say, half an hour, and, if we hear nothing of our friends in that time, we will mount our horses and gallop for help to New Helvetia. What do you say?"
"Yes, yes, by all means! But, oh, why, why did we let them go!"
"We couldn't help it," said Jardine rather bitterly. He was not wont to be so frustrated and set at naught. He was a man of consideration in the ordinary associations of life. Never had he suffered such disparagement as at the hands of these youthful feather-pates.
"But they will probably come out all right," he added, "in a little while, and you and I will have the pleasure of figuring as alarmists and cowards—afraid of the cave."
"What a wild country—what wild people," Ruth shuddered.
"We will give them half an hour," suggested Jardine, drawing out his watch to consult it. "And if they do not rejoin us in that time we will raise the countryside."
She assented rather dolorously, and sat down on the ledge as before, while Jardine resumed his place on the boulder, near at hand.
The wind blew freshly through the odorous woods; the gold leaves shifted down in showers; the crystal rill went purling over the moss, and, as her watch which she held in her hand ticked away the minutes, she looked eagerly ever and anon at the dark crevice-like entrance to the cave, listening vainly, hoping to hear her brother's boisterous, boyish voice.