As she lay in her bed, too, she fancied she could hear the man’s firm step patrolling the paths about the place.
But Michael Sturgess was a couple of miles away, though he had been down to the cottage, and so close that he could look in and see that his chief was not there still. For there were bounds to the man’s patient doggedness, and he had grown wearied out at last, when Clive Reed had taken a short cut over the mountain, home, and did not return by the spoil bank and the shelf-like path.
Still Dinah Gurdon could not know this as she lay there, torn by the mental fever which made her temples throb.
Loved—loved by one who idolised her, and who had made her heart awaken and unfold to the true meaning of the great passion of human life. He loved her as she loved him, and she had let him press her in his arms; she had thrilled beneath his kisses, and all as in a dream of joy and delight. Safe, too, with him near to cherish and protect. Then he had left her, and the old cloud of horror and dread had come back, and with it the still small voice of conscience out of the darkness of her heart. Ought she not to have spoken? Ought she not to have whispered to her father, or failing him, to have confided in their old servant—the only woman near—the terror of that day, and how she had been haunted since?
Always the same reply as her woman’s heart rebelled and shrank from the confession. How could she? She dared not. She would sooner have died than made the avowal, while there before her, looming up, the precursors of a storm, were the black clouds of the future, and Michael Sturgess’s words vibrating always in her ears.
Chapter Twenty Two.
Bad Omens.
“No insolence, sir!”