Jem Stickels burst into a mocking, insulting laugh, but Clifford did not care. As his friends, Jordan and Otto Conybeare would have said, he was by this time “too far gone.”
Nell had disappeared again by the time he got back into the garden, and he had to look about for some minutes before he perceived her, crossing the fields, this time in the direction of Fleet, at a great rate. She had a basket on her arm, and she was walking so quickly that Clifford could at first scarcely believe that the figure which had got over so much ground in so few minutes could really be that of the girl he had seen in her uncle’s garden a few minutes before.
He was determined to show her his recovered watch, always hoping against hope that a fresh development of the mystery would bring about the longed-for explanation. But before he could overtake her, she disappeared from his sight over the crest of the rising ground at Fleet, and when he got upon the hill, in his turn, she was nowhere to be seen.
It was not for some time, after exploring right and left, that he saw Nell, with an old broom in her hand, emerge from a poor little cottage which stood by itself on the marsh below. She set to work very vigorously to sweep out the dust of the cottage floor, the doorstep and the bit of paved ground outside; and Clifford had stood for some seconds at a little distance, warned by the expression of her face that she was in no mood for conversation, when she at last raised her eyes and met his.
A shock of pain convulsed the young man when he saw what a change the past few hours had made in the girl. Instead of the placid sweetness of the day before, there was in her eyes such a world of sadness, of terror, that Clifford’s heart smote him, and he wished that he had suffered his loss quietly without a word to anybody at the inn.
She stopped in her work when she saw him and stood erect, waiting, in an attitude which had something of defiance in it.
“You have something to say to me, I suppose?” she said at once, coldly.
Clifford did not immediately answer, but his hand went involuntarily up to the chain of his watch, which he was now wearing.
In an instant her face became as white as that of a dead person.
“Where--where did you find it?” stammered she.