“Julie! Where are you? Coo-ee!” Cynthia’s bright young voice broke the spell, and Julia’s eyes closed as she backed slowly away for a few yards before she dare turn and run towards her sister.
“Oh, there you are, Julie. If I did not think you were in the other direction! Why, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“No, no,” said Julia, hastily; “I think I am hot; it is tiring out here. Let us go home; I—I want to get back.”
“Why, Julie, you don’t come out enough; you are done up directly. There, come along out into the fields, there’s more fresh air there. I say, did I tell you that we are to go to town next week?”
“No,” said Julia, who shivered at every sound in the copse, and glanced from side to side, as if she expected to be seized at any moment.
“But we are, and I don’t know but what I long to be up in London to get away from Harry Artingale.”
“To get away?” said Julia, making an effort to be composed, and wondering why she had not told her sister what she had seen.
“Yes, I want to get away; for of course,” she added, archly, “he will have to stay down here.”
She spoke loudly, and all that had been said and left unsaid appealed very strongly to the senses of the great fellow in the copse.
Julia need not have felt afraid that he was about to rise up and seize her; he remained perfectly still for a few moments, and then rolled over upon his back, laughing heartily, but in a perfectly silent manner, before having a struggle with himself to drag a short pipe and a tobacco-pouch out of his pocket.