Nell insisted, however, on getting an answer from him.
“I think, darling,” he then said, very tenderly, “that you have been troubling yourself a great deal more than you need have done. And that you will find plenty of other people as ready as I am to say that Nell Claris would never merit a dreadful punishment, even if she tried.”
These words were not said merely to satisfy her. He began to feel, as she did, that the thrashing out of the whole matter, horrible as the process must be, was better for her in every way than the suspense from which she had been so long suffering. Whatever her share in the affair might have been, it had certainly been a passive and an unwilling, if not an altogether unconscious one. His answer seemed to content the girl, for she walked on by his side without any further remark, while a more placid expression began to appear in her wan face.
It was almost in silence that they went on walking briskly in the direction of the bay, which they reached by the short way over the fields. A cab was waiting, as the police-sergeant had promised, on the road outside the village. As soon as Nell saw it she stopped short and said:
“I was forgetting what I wanted to say to you. I want you to go to Shingle End. And I want you to tell them there—to tell the Colonel—that the police have come for me.”
“To tell the Colonel?” echoed Clifford, stupidly, struck with a remembrance of the vague suspicions he had had on his recent visit to that gentleman’s house.
“Yes.”
He wanted to ask her more questions. But she saw his intention, and walked briskly on. A few paces farther she was met by the police-sergeant, who saluted her respectfully, and held open the door of the cab. Nell turned and gave her hand in silence to Clifford. But as he pressed it for a brief moment in his, she again looked up in his face with the flicker of a smile on her lips and in her eyes.
“Surely,” thought he to himself, “it is hope, and not despair, which I see in her eyes!”
The cab door was shut, and Clifford, who had a long walk before him, walked briskly past it, in the direction of the Stroan road. But before he had gone many steps he heard the voice of the police-sergeant behind him.