“Or frighten Miss Geraldine,” said Florence, “so it’s quite our duty to give a warning.”
Chapter Eleven.
Meeting.
If Wyn Warren had chanced to be in the right part of the wood at the right time on the afternoon after he found the owl’s nest, he might have seen all the three objects of his search. For while he was leading Dobbles across the park towards the wood in order that Mr Edgar might try to sketch the lily pond, and hoping while his master was so engaged to get another chance of hunting for the letter, a respectable-looking nurse with a little boy and girl in pretty summer clothes came along the path from Ravenshurst to the stile in the Raby road. They passed the tall red-bearded man who had given Wyn the letter; but, being strangers to Ashcroft, his appearance there struck them as nothing remarkable; the nurse was holding the little boy by the hand, and the girl, running round her, was picking up moss and twigs, when her eyes fell on the spot which Wyn’s had failed to find, and on which the red-bearded stranger’s had never lighted. She had found one pretty, funny, white puff-ball, and she thought this other white object lying under the ferns was such another, till she took it in her hand and found that it was something much more familiar to her, namely, a letter in an envelope, moistened, and ready to break with the damp of the woods.
Lily Carleton poked her little fat fingers under the seal till the paper gave way and the open letter was in her hand, and she threw the envelope away and spread out the letter.
“It’s a letter from the fairies,” she thought, nodding her head, for she was a fanciful little person. “I’ll take it home and get mother to read it to me.”
She stuffed the letter into her little pocket, and, all unknowing, passed the writer of it, close to the stile in the Raby road, talking to the man with the red beard—a combination which would certainly have led Wyn to think that the two mysterious strangers were plotting mischief.
“Shall you go then, sir, as you have had no answer?” said he of the red beard.