"That's all. I saw the light of a lantern gleaming through the cracks of the door, and I felt as if I had been accessory before the fact—isn't that what they call it?—to a murder. Of course, I saw Mrs. Driscoll this morning, and I taxed her right out, and she swore she knew nothing about it. At all events, I told her it mustn't occur again and I think I frightened her."
"That chap Moriarty must be an expert poacher," said Mr. Dashwood.
"Expert is no name for it, if he's done all I suspect him of doing. It's a most strange position, for I believe they don't see any harm in it. You see, they seem to look upon the people about here as enemies and Sussex as an enemy's country, and really, you know, they have still a good deal of the original savage clinging to them. I found a notched stick in the kitchen the other day, and I found it belonged to Norah. Every notch on it stood for a week that she had been here."
"They used to do that at cricket matches long ago to score the runs. I've seen an old rustic Johnny—they said he was 104—doing it."
"Let's stop here for a moment," said the girl.
Miss Grimshaw and Mr. Dashwood had reached the little bridge on the Roman road at the foot of the hill. The river, wimpling and sparkling in the sunlight, was alive as in summer, but all else was dead—or asleep. Dead leaves had blown in the river bed and floated on the water, or were mossed in the crevices of the stones here and there. They found a brown carpet amid the trees of the wood. You could see far in amid the trees, whose leafless branches formed a brown network against the blue winter sky.
From amid the tree, from here, from there, came occasionally the twitter of a bird. Not a breath of wind stirred the branches, and the place had the stillness of a stereoscopic picture. This spot, so haunted by poetry and beauty in summer, in winter was not entirely deserted. On a day like this it had a strange beauty of its own.
Temptation comes in waves. The all but overmastering temptation to seize the girl in his arms and kiss her, which had assailed Mr. Dashwood on the hillside, was now returning gradually. She was leaning with her elbows on the balustrade of the bridge; her clear-cut profile, delicately outlined against the winter trees, held him, as one is held by the graceful curves of a cameo.
Down here, to-day, everything was preternaturally still. The essential and age-old silence of the Roman road seemed to have flooded over the country as a river floods over its banks; the warbling and muttering of the water running beneath the bridge served only to accentuate this silence and point out its intensity.