With a white, determined face she bent over the writing-table and scribbled a hasty note. Her hand shook, but she controlled it resolutely.
Words flicked rapidly into being under her pen: "I shall be behind the tamarisks to-night."
CHAPTER IV
THE BROAD ROAD
Bernard Monck never forgot the day of Scooter's death. It was as indelibly fixed in his memory as in that of Tessa.
The child's wild agony of grief was of so utterly abandoned a nature as to be almost Oriental in its violence. The passionate force of her resentment against her mother also was not easy to cope with though he quelled it eventually. But when that was over, when she had wept herself exhausted in his arms at last, there followed a period of numbness that made him seriously uneasy.
Mrs. Ralston had gone out before the tragedy had occurred, but Major Ralston presently came to his relief. He stooped over Tessa with a few kindly words, but when he saw the child's face his own changed somewhat.
"This won't do," he said to Bernard, holding the slender wrist. "We must get her to bed. Where's her ayah?"