“I must trust to Bunny getting him safely off, whether I will or not,” he muttered. “Oh, but he’s sure to get him aboard, and I had not reckoned on this. Father is up at the porch door by now, to find the soldiers searching the place, and the first thing he will say will be, ‘Where is Waller?’”
The next minute the boy was trotting steadily back towards the Manor, trusting more to instinct than to sight in avoiding the trees.
“And I never said good-bye!” he kept on muttering. “I never said good-bye!”
Then all at once he stopped short, panting hard, partly from exertion, partly from excitement, for the thought came strong upon him now of his father.
“He will ask me,” he panted, “where I have been; and what am I to say?”
An end to the boy’s musings was put by the returning post-chaise, whose wheels he heard far ahead, and as soon as it had passed he hurried on along the road; but before he had gone far he took to cover again, for voices were approaching him in the darkness, one of which, loud and threatening, Waller recognised at once as that of the sergeant in command of the search-party.
He was talking in a menacing tone, and the reply came in a husky, petulant voice, plainly that of the village constable, while directly after there was a chorus of laughter.
Waller shrank farther back amongst the trees, and stood thinking much of his friend’s escape, of this second fruitless mission of the soldiery, but, above all, of that which was before him, for, as he hurried on, there, straight before him, his father’s stern countenance seemed to rise out of the darkness to look at him with questioning eyes.
The rest of the journey back he saw nothing, heard nothing, thought of nothing, but that stern, questioning face. In fact, later on it seemed to the lad as if there had been a blank until he found himself standing in the well-lit dining-room, listening to his father’s words.
These were very few, the principal being comprised in the question, very shortly and sharply uttered—