“I’d go just the same,” said Bayre, passionately. “Go straight there the moment I got to England.”
“Would you? Would you really do that? But I don’t see why you should. Why should you?”
There was just enough agitation in the girl’s voice, showing that she was touched, grateful, for the young man to be thrown at once off his balance.
“Because I love you,” was his straightforward answer, uttered in a low voice that thrilled her in spite of herself.
She did not shrink away, she did not answer; but she walked on beside him silently, biting her lip, and looking down. His head was still bent as he tried to look into her face, feeling that he had hazarded his all on one cast and that her next words must make or mar him for ever.
While they were both at white heat, as it were, he in the thraldom of his passion and she held by a pang of new and strange emotion, there fell upon them, like water upon a conflagration, the sound of a thick, husky man’s voice—the voice of a man to whom exercise was a burden and a fatigue.
“Hein!” said the voice.
And at the sound the two young people shivered guiltily and stopped, turning, as they did so, to face the direction whence the sound came.
And on the other side of a low stone wall, where a clump of evergreens had hidden him from sight as they passed, they saw the portly form, the round, red face, and the Panama hat of Monsieur Blaise.
But he was not wearing his blue goggles. He had taken these off and held them in one hand, in order that he might have a clearer and better view of the guilty couple.