“I can walk, too,” said Lexy. “It’s only three miles.”
“I don’t want you to, Miss Moran.”
“I’m coming anyhow,” she replied.
For that instinct in her, the thing which was beyond reason, drove her forward. She could not let him go alone. She had walked that three miles once before to-day, and she had walked farther than that with Houseman in the afternoon. She was tired, terribly tired, and filled with a queer, sick reluctance to approach that sinister house again; but she had to go. She had said to herself that morning that she was coming back, and now she was going to do so.
They did not try to talk much on the way. What had they to say? They were both filled with a dread foreboding. They hurried, yet they wished never to come to the end of the journey.
They turned down the lane, leaving the lights of the highway behind, and went forward in thick darkness, under the shadow of the trees. The sound of the sea came to them—the loneliest sound in all the world.
“There’s a light in the house, anyhow!” said Lexy suddenly.
Her own voice sounded so small, so pert, so futile, in the dark, that she felt no surprise when Captain Grey showed a faint trace of impatience in answering.
“Naturally!” he said.
Only, to her, it did not seem natural, that one little light shining out through the glass of the front door. It would be more natural, she thought, if there were only the darkness and the sound of the sea.[Pg 360]