A guilty conscience needs no accuser; so runs the old proverbial saying.
Rolph had caught sight of an extra large blackberry and he had reached out and picked it, more from habit, fostered by a country life, than desire, and then passed on.
A long time appeared to elapse, during which Marjorie lay listening to steps which thundered upon her ear, before a voice, that sounded as if it came from far away, whispered,—
“It’s all right, now. I don’t think he saw.”
Marjorie looked at the speaker strangely, and then turned away, plunging into the thickest part of the wood to try and grow calm before making her way home, and in perfect unconsciousness of the fact that, not twenty yards away, Caleb Kent was following her, gliding from tree to tree, and always keeping her in sight.
Sometimes she stopped to rest her hand upon one of the pine trunks, apparently wrapt in thought; and Caleb Kent drew a long breath and told himself that she was thinking about him. Then she walked swiftly on again till she was at the very edge of the wood, where she stepped down into the sandy lane where he could not follow; but, quickly, almost as a squirrel, he mounted a tall spruce by its short, dense, ladder-like branches, to where, high up, he could still keep the girl in sight, elated by his adventure, and little thinking that she was asking herself whether it would be very difficult to kill Caleb Kent next time she met him in the woods, and so silence for ever a tongue whose utterances might ruin her beyond recovery.
“Something to drink—something to drink,” she kept on thinking. “To drink my health.”
Her eyes brightened, and her strange look told of an excitement within her which made every pulse throb and bound.
“It would be so easy,” she said to herself. But the feeling of elation passed away as she recalled the man’s furtive, suspicious nature, and, in imagination, saw him fixing his keen eyes upon her, and asking her to drink first.