She had been pondering the same marvel herself, but took care not to express her astonishment.
"It's not—not at all the kind of place you expected, is it?"
Nelly thought it strange that her heart should beat, and her breath come quick, in asking so simple a question.
He tried to catch her eye, but she steadily refused to look at him, while he answered, "I thought it would be a prison and a purgatory. I never dreamed it was to prove a Para—"
He stopped short without finishing the word, for she had grown deadly pale, and her blue eyes, looking over his head at something beyond and behind him, were dilated with actual fear. Turning in the same direction, he could detect no more alarming object than a stout square-built man, in a black riding suit, walking leisurely towards them through the soft sand.
"Good-morrow, Mistress Carew," said Abner Gale's harsh voice, while the scowl that accompanied his greeting gave it more the character of a ban than a blessing. "They told me in the village I should find you here or hereabouts, but I didn't think to see you so well attended. My service to you, sir," scanning John Garnet from head to foot. "A warm day this, but pleasant enough to be taking a young woman a walk by the sea-shore."
There was something offensive in the man's tone and manner. At any other time John Garnet would probably have resented his intrusion on the spot, but his attention was now so entirely taken up with Nelly's discomposure, that he failed to notice those indications of a wish to brawl, which he was generally only too ready to indulge.
Parson Gale was indeed in the worst of humours. Only the night before he had reached his home, and yet no sooner had he broken his morning fast, than, after a visit to his Spanish pointer, a cursory glance at his Irish pigs, but taking no thought whatever for his Devonshire parish, he was in the saddle again to get a glimpse of Nelly Carew. Following the devious tracks of Exmoor, with the instinct of the wild sheep, the wild ponies, or the wilder red-deer, he threaded the coombe into Badgeworthy, crossed its foaming waters at his accustomed ford, climbed and clattered amongst the rocks, cantered freely over the heather, and paced down the hill into Porlock like a man in a dream—for his whole mind was filled with the fair face and the blue eyes that he had hungered to look on for weeks. Though familiar with every acre of the forest and the moor, he would never have reached his destination, but that his horse knew the way as well as his master, having travelled it many a time of late.
It was characteristic of the man that he should not have ridden straight to old Carew's cottage, and gone frankly in to see his friends. He stabled his horse instead at a little farm on the outskirts of the village, and hovered stealthily about its vicinity, hoping to meet some one who would tell him how matters had been going on in his absence.