He stopped for a few minutes, thinking, and then walked slowly up towards the back entrance, musing slowly and deeply, as gardeners will muse.
“I don’t seem to move her yet much, but I’m not going to give up. Hang me if I didn’t for a moment think he might have been after her. But no; he couldn’t be. Poor lass! so quiet and serious, and full o’ trouble, just the sort o’ woman a man could trust to bring all his savings to. Now, I wonder what it is in a widow as leads a chap on so. I don’t know, but she’s leading me on, and the day as she’s been a widow twelve month, sir, I’ll speak to her like a man.”
Reuben Brime, the biggest fool in Danmouth, according to his mother, opened the back door, and went into the house just at the same moment that Doctor Asher entered up the front.
Meanwhile, Chris Lisle had walked quickly down the narrow paved stone alley leading to the main path, crossed the lower drawbridge, and, with his teeth set, felt ready to curse himself for his folly.
“The contemptible, degrading position,” he muttered. “To be under the thumb of a servant who will look at me furtively, and whom I shall have to bribe into silence for fear of his confounded tongue. Oh, my darling, forgive me. It was for your sake I came, but I must have been half-mad.”
He was walking quickly down the roadway leading to the public cliff path, so intent upon the events of the night that he was right upon some one coming in the other direction before he realised the fact, and they met just in a part where the moon shone clearly.
“Ah, Mr Lisle,” said the doctor’s cheery voice, “nice evening, isn’t it?”
He passed on, and Chris almost staggered and reeled.
“Good heaven!” he groaned to himself. “I can’t ask him, and now he will go and tell them all that he met me coming from the house. What will Claude think. What will Gartram say?”
He went on, trying to find some excuse for his presence in that private roadway, but there was none. Any one coming along there must have been up to the Fort, and he had done a bad night’s work in yielding to his passionate desire to see Claude, and hear from her lips words of encouragement such as would make the situation more bearable—a worse night’s work than he realised for some time to come.