“Hold your noise!” said Waters; “don’t you see the orsifer as leads you thinks there’s a trap?”
“Wheer? I don’t see no trap. Wot sorter trap?” growled Tom Tully.
“Will yer be quiet, Tommy!” whispered the gunner. “What a chap you are!”
“Yes, ar’n’t I?” said the big sailor, taking his messmate’s remark as a compliment; and settling himself tailor-fashion upon the ground, he waited until the reconnaissance was over.
For Hilary was scanning the front of the old house most carefully. There was the room in which he had been imprisoned, with the window still open, and the thin white cord swinging gently in the air. There was Adela’s room, open-windowed too, and there also was the room where he had seen Sir Henry busy writing, with his child at his knee.
Where were they now? he asked himself, and his heart felt a sudden throb as he thought of the possibility of their being still in the house and in danger.
But he cast the thought away directly, feeling sure that Sir Henry, a proscribed political offender, would not, for his own and his child’s sake, run the slightest risk of being taken.
“But suppose he trusts to me, and thinks that I care too much for them to betray their hiding-place?”
His brow turned damp at the thought, and for a moment, as he saw in imagination his old companion Adela looking reproachfully at him for having sent her father to the block, he felt that at all costs he must take the men back.
Then came reaction.