So they rode and talked, under the pale green leaves that were bursting into a delicate lace-work on the branches overhead, happy together to all outward seeming, but at cross purposes in reality; he thinking that she listened and understood, she believing him merely friendly, and wishing she could change his sympathetic kindness for the cold disapprobation of that other one who had been wounded through her folly.
From the darker shadows of the undergrowth a pair of malevolent eyes followed them.
“What is she talking so free and smiling with that ugly swell for?” Stephen Lee asked himself. “Bad luck to the day when he and that hulking giant trespassed into these grounds. I wish I’d ’a’ killed him and this chap, too.”
Down in his fierce heart, Stephen Lee cherished a secret passion for his beautiful young mistress, the existence of which she never once suspected. Unknown to her, his destiny was influenced by hers, and he was the means of communicating news concerning her at stated times to some birds of evil omen who were sometimes to be found at nightfall hovering within the confines of Cranstoun woods. Sir Philip would have been furious indeed could he have guessed that a member of the hated gypsy tribe had been for five years earning his living in his service; yet such was the case. The handsome, black-bearded young keeper, known as Stephen Lee, and one of the best men on the Cranstoun estates, was a true Romany, and hated his master with a hatred to the full as bitter as Sir Philip cherished against the entire gypsy tribe.
Yet at this moment, as he watched Stella and Lord Carthew ride by laughing and talking gayly, Stephen found himself wishing Sir Philip home again.
“The gray wolf would soon put a stop to this,” he said. “If it was the other chap, the lord, he might forgive it. I know right enough he means to try and marry her to some tip-top swell. But old Sarah will see her way to prevent that, I reckon.”
He was muttering to himself, when a hard, rasping voice, speaking in low tones immediately behind him, made him start in surprise.
“Is that the friend of the man you shot?”
Sir Philip himself stood among the brushwood, attired in a light tweed suit, as cool and unmoved as though he had not been absent from home for more than a month. The accident had only taken place on the preceding evening, and Stephen judged by the small handbag that Sir Philip was carrying, and by the direction from which he was coming, that he had not been home. Yet already he was quite well acquainted with what had taken place in the woods on the preceding evening. But Stephen Lee had long before this suspected some system of spying by which the master of the Chase contrived to inform himself of the doings of his household in his absence, and he was not therefore much surprised by Sir Philip’s question, to which he responded, after his wont, in a civil monosyllable:
“Yes, sir.”