"There was something I lost. Then, 'My dear child,' I heard her say, 'you must allow me here to know what is appropriate, what is expected. What isn't expected, is that an inexperienced girl, strange to the place, should be running about dark roads this time of night. You would be misunderstood. I should be misunderstood if I let you.' Then Nan was, 'So sorry!' and 'Forgive me, Greta!' They kissed. Nan went slowly back to the inn. Then, instead of turning into the Kirklamont footpath, Schwarzenberg came up the hill. I laughed to myself to think of her surprise when she should come across me. But she turned to the left and cut across the west flank. I thought maybe the woman had got bewildered, going in unaccustomed places at night. But she wasn't walking like a bewildered person at all. Do you know what she was walking like? Like a person who has done the same thing before. She was making straight as a die for that old shepherd's hut the bracken cutters use. She went into that hut and stayed there three quarters of an hour."
"No!"
"And when she came out, Ernst Pforzheim was with her. They came along so near me that I began to be sorry for them. They were heading straight for a nasty jar when they should see me. Well, they didn't see me. They went by not five yards away from the stone pile I was leaning against—talking hard in German, till I lost sound and sight of them."
"God bless me!"
"I'm sorry, Gavan." To Napier's amazement, Julian was looking at him with pitying eyes. Evidently, he thought, in spite of his friend's air of humorous detachment, he had been cherishing some genuine feeling for Miss Greta.
The idea, especially in view of the revelation, offended Napier's amour propre. "I hadn't thought it necessary to tell anybody," he said, "but I knew there was—or there had been—a Pforzheim friendship under the rose."
"You didn't think it necessary to tell...."
"I was in the Schwarzenberg's confidence before ... all this. I couldn't give her away, could I?"
"You needn't have given her away. The merest hint would have warned me. You might have thought of Nan!" he burst out passionately.
"Oh, everybody can't be thinking of Nan, to the exclusion of everybody else."