"Weary!" he repeated, "weary of Porlock! weary of you, Nelly, from whom I never mean to part! How can you say such things. You know you did not mean it!" And again Nelly's disclaimer was stifled on her lips.
"Besides," he added, gaily, "What can a man want to make him happy more than I have here? The sweetest girl in the world to walk with, and the best horse in England to ride. I gave him a ten-mile stretch on the moor this morning, while you were fast asleep and dreaming. Were you dreaming, Nelly?"
"Never mind my dreams," she answered, blushing. "If I did dream of somebody, I'm not going to say so. Tell me about your ride."
"I met a strange old man," he continued, "so weird-looking, that in the North we should have thought him something uncanny, a Brownie, at least, or a wandering spirit of the moor. Not that he was a jack-o'-lanthorn nor will-o'-the-wisp, for he showed me the way out, instead of luring me into a bog, or I should have been there now."
"You must never try to cross our moors without me," said Nelly, gravely, "or somebody who knows them well, to take care of you."
"Will you take care of me?" and "never mind, that is not the question now," were two necessary interpolations before John Garnet could proceed.
"The man knew his ground, every inch of it," he continued, "and offered to put me in the right way for home. His pony, he said, was hobbled at the head of the coombe, but he seemed to think very little of walking ten miles out of his road, and he looked between seventy and eighty."
"It must have been Red Rube!" exclaimed Nelly, joyfully. "Did he say there were deer in Horner Woods? Oh! how I long for a gallop over the moor after a stag, and—with you!"
John Garnet pondered. There would be little risk, he thought, in joining these West-country gentlemen in the hunting-field. Most of them were of his own way of thinking in politics, and for many, his ready audacity had preserved, at least temporarily, both life and lands. Even if recognised, it was unlikely he would be denounced; and then, the temptation! To ride Katerfelto far ahead of meaner steeds from ridge to ridge and coombe to coombe, sweeping over mountain and moor as though on the wings of an eagle, to hover at last alone in his glory above the dying deer, while a burst of music from the good hounds pealing louder than its roar, announced in a crash of triumph that here, under the deafening waterfall, they had set him up to bay!
Yes, he would have a ride, he resolved, in pursuit of the red deer, at any risk and at any cost!