“And yet you object to his going to see the girl when we are out! There, get along, Betsy; we shall never be there.”
The whip whistled round the cob’s head and the chaise turned down a pleasant woody lane, just as Christie Bayle lifted the latch and entered the doctor’s garden.
It was very beautiful there in the bright morning sunshine; the velvet turf so green and smooth, and the beds vying one with the other in brightness. There was no one in the garden, and all seemed strangely still at the house, with its open windows and flower-decked porch.
Bayle had been requested to look in and execute a commission for the doctor, but all the same he felt guilty: and though he directed an eager glance or two at the open windows, he turned, with his heart throbbing heavily, to the end of the closely-clipped yew hedge, and passed round into the kitchen-garden, and then up one walk and down another, to the sunny-sheltered top, where the doctor grew his cucumbers, and broke down with his melons every year.
There was a delicious scent from the cuttings of the lawn, which were piled round the frame, fermenting and giving out heat: and as the curate reached the glass lights, there was the interior hung with great dewdrops, which began to coalesce and run off as he raised the ends of the lights and looked in.
Puff! quite a wave of heated air, fragrant with the young growth of the plants, all looking richly green and healthy, and with the golden, starry blossoms peeping here and there.
Quite at home, Christie Bayle thrust in his arm and took out a little block of wood cut like an old-fashioned gun-carriage or a set of steps, and with this he propped up one light, so that the heat might escape and the temperature fall.
This done he moved to the next, and thrust down the light, for he had seen from the other side a glistening, irregular, iridescent streak, which told of the track of an enemy, and this enemy had to be found.
That light uttered a loud plaintive squeak as it was thrust down, a sound peculiar to the lights of cucumber-frames; and, leaning over the edge, Bayle began to peer about among the broad prickly leaves.
Yes, there was the enemy’s trail, and he must be found, for it would have been cruel to the doctor to have left such a devouring creature there.