The wait, however, began to seem very long, since the wavering advance of the point of light was very slow. Betsey, in the lagging delay as the seconds passed, felt her attention beginning to wander. She noticed how slim and graceful were the sweeping boughs of the tree that hid them, she observed the thin frettings of black and white of the shadows of the leaves on the wall. Very earnestly she wished that she could sit as still as David could and not be tempted to swing her feet against the stones. She began to think, as the minutes still dragged, of that man they had seen go in at Miss Miranda’s gate.
“David,” she leaned over to whisper, “you said you had seen that man before. What did he look like?”
“Why,” David answered, coming out of his own thoughts with a start, “he was dark, rather heavy, but with a thin face. I didn’t like him.”
“Did he have,” a slow possibility was dawning in Betsey’s mind, as she dwelt upon who this man might be, why he had come, and as she recollected a chance phrase spoken by the farmer’s wife beside the river, “did he have a sharp, selfish face?”
“Why, I think so.” David spoke so very slowly that she could have shaken him for his deliberation. “Yes, I rather think he did. He had scowling black eyebrows and eyes very close together. Yes, I would put it just that way myself, a sharp, selfish face.”
That was the way Mrs. Bassett had put it, and Michael also. Elizabeth swung her feet over to the other side of the wall, the weird, moving light quite forgotten.
“I am going back,” she said. “It must be that cousin, Donald Reynolds. I do believe he was waiting in the lane for Miss Miranda to go out, so that he could find her father alone. And she has always dreaded his coming. Oh, why didn’t we think who it was before!”
“But—but—” stammered David, quite dazed.
One more minute and that hidden figure would move across the moon, but she had no thought for that mystery now. She jumped down outside the wall and ran, ran with all breathless speed, stumbling in the thick grass and over jutting roots and stones until she came out at last into the moonlit lane. Her heart was thumping against her side and Miss Miranda’s gate looked very far. She sped down the hill with no further thought of what she and David had gone out to find; it was no time to be spying on goblins when this much-dreaded and very real person was so near.