“What! And then return alone to Hurst? Nay, indeed, Miss Joan, I’ll not suffer that.”
“Then, sir, you must pass the night under my father’s roof. He will be pleased to have you. He was abroad when I left home, visiting a sick woman. But he will be home again by this, and will, I am sure, receive you with a hearty greeting.”
“You are both all goodness, all kindness. I know not how to thank you!”
His voice trembled, and when he had said these words there was silence between them.
Prosaic as their conversation had been since they left the farmhouse, there was an undercurrent of deep feeling in both their hearts which lent a vivid interest to their commonplace words. To Tregenna there was thrilling, sweetest music in every tone of the voice of this young girl, who had exposed herself so undauntedly to danger in the determination to save him from the results of his own daring. While to Joan, careful as she was to speak stiffly and even coldly, there was a secret delight in the knowledge of the real peril from which she had saved her handsome companion.
He was, however, loth to accept her invitation to stay at the Parsonage, fearing that he might, by so doing, bring the vengeance of the smugglers on the heads of both father and daughter. She made light of this fear; but finally, at her urgent entreaties, he agreed to go home with her in the first place, and to take Parson Langney’s advice as to going further that night or not.
Hardly had this been settled between the two young people, when the horse they rode pricked up his ears, rousing the attention of his riders.
They had now left the open fields, and were passing through a wild bit of country where knots of trees, well-grown hedges, and clumps of bramble made it difficult for them to see far in any direction, and formed, moreover, safe hiding-places where an enemy might lie in ambush unperceived and unsuspected.
In the distance, before them a little to the left, lay the marshes, with the white vapor rolling over them from the sea.
Tregenna reined in the horse to reconnoiter. Trees on the right, a hedge on the left of the miry road. Not a living creature to be seen. In the copse, however, there was a rustling and crackling to be heard, which might be the result of the night-wind, or might not.