‘She?’ Ella looks at him timidly. ‘You think she will come again?’
‘Mrs. Prior?’—contemptuously; ‘no. But there will be others. What do you think people are saying?’
‘Saying of me?’ She looks frightened. ‘They have heard about that night at the Professor’s?’ questions she. She looks now almost on the verge of fainting. ‘Your aunt—she—did she know? She said nothing.’
‘No. She knows nothing of that,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. After all, it is impossible to explain to her. But Miss Manning will know—she will know what to say.
‘She only saw me in the tree,’ says the girl, with a voice that is now half sobbing. And then she thought you—that I—oh!’—more wretchedly still—‘I don’t know what she thought! But’—trembling—‘I wish I had never climbed into that tree.’
‘Because she happened to see you? Never mind that. She’s got eyes in the back of her head; no one could escape her,’ says he, touched by her agitation.
‘I am not thinking of her,’ says Ella proudly, making a gesture that might almost be called imperious. ‘I am only vexed because you are angry with me about it. But’—eagerly—‘I never thought anyone would find me out, and I did so want to see what you—what’—quickly correcting herself and colouring faintly—‘you were all doing in the Rectory garden.’
‘If you want so much, and so naturally,’ says he, ‘to see your fellow-people, why didn’t you accept Susan’s invitation? It would have prevented all this.’
‘I know. But I couldn’t,’ says she, hanging her pretty head. ‘You know I tried it once, and it was only when I got back again here—here into this safe, safe place—that I knew how frightened I had been all the time. And you may remember how I fancied then, on my return, that I had seen——’ She stops as if unable to go on.
‘I know. I remember. But that was a mere hallucination, I am sure. You must try to conquer such absurd fears. Promise me you will try.’