He spoke in a jeering tone, but Freda did not mind that now.
“I wish,” she said, looking wistfully at the blazing log, “that you were going to stay here, Crispin.”
He gave one of his short, hard laughs.
“I should get spoilt for work,” he said. “You’d make a ladies’-man of me. Sha’n’t see you again. Good-night.”
Freda held out her hand, and he held it a moment in his, while a gleam almost of tenderness passed over his seamed and rugged face. Then he gave her fingers a sudden, rough squeeze, which left her red girl’s hand for a minute white and helpless.
“Good-night,” he then said again, shortly and as if indifferently. “If I come into these parts again, I’ll give you a look in.”
He left her hardly time to murmur “good-night” in answer, before he was out of the room. He put his head in again immediately, however, to say “Draw the bolt of the door, and you’ll be all right.”
Freda obeyed this direction at once, with another little quiver of the heart. But Crispin’s kindness had so warmed her that what now chiefly troubled her was the fact that she would see no more of him for an indefinite time. The strongest proof of the confidence he had inspired in her was the fact that she accepted implicitly his assurance as to her father’s wishes, and resolved to make no attempt to return to the convent. Indeed, the last three days had been so full of excitement and adventure that the old, calm years seemed to have been passed by some other person.
Freda’s last thought as she fell asleep, watching the dancing light of the fire on the roughly white-washed beams of the ceiling, was, however, neither of quiet nuns at their prayers in the convent by the sea, nor of Crispin Bean with his rugged face and hard voice, but of Oldcastle Farm and one of its occupants.
The girl was tired out; so utterly weary that she was ready to lie like a log till morning. But presently she began to dream, with the leaden drowsiness of a person in whom some outward disturbance struggles with fatigue, of thunder and battling crowds of men. And then she started into wakefulness, and found that the fire had burnt low, and that men’s loud voices were disturbing her rest. They seemed to come, muffled by the massive boards between, from a chamber under hers; they died away into faintness, and she was so overpowered with fatigue that she would have dropped to sleep again almost without troubling herself, when one voice suddenly broke out above the murmur. It was loud and shrill, and high-pitched, a voice Freda had never heard before. She could hear the words it uttered: