"And you inconsequently decided to put up a bluff of this kind on the British nation because Esmond might involve in difficulties a girl with whom you are not in love. I'm presuming you are not in love with her?"
Ingleby seemed a trifle disconcerted. "No," he said sharply. "Of course I'm not. What made you suggest it?"
Sewell laughed. "Well," he said, "for one thing, if you had been in love with her, you could scarcely have done anything that would have made the fact clearer."
There was silence for a minute or two, and Ingleby leaned upon the tree with his thoughts in confusion. He was not in love with Hetty Leger, but it was certainly a fact that her arrest had filled him with an almost unaccountable consternation. He also remembered the curious little laugh with which she had clung to him, and that it had stirred him as no trifling favour Grace Coulthurst had ever shown him had done. The commissioner's daughter had, however, certainly never leaned upon his shoulder with her arms about him, though he had on one occasion, when she was half-frozen, practically carried her into her father's dwelling. The thought of it was, in a curious fashion, almost distasteful, as well as preposterous. His regard for her was largely that of a devotee, an æsthetic respect which would have made any display of purely human proclivities on the part of the goddess a trifle disconcerting.
There are men like Ingleby whose life is, partly from inclination and partly from force of circumstances, in some respects one of puritanical simplicity, especially in the back blocks of England's colonies; and, startled by Sewell's suggestion, he tried to reason with himself as he leaned against the tree. He remembered now how he had thrilled to the girl's touch as, half-crying and half-laughing, she had rested in his arms a few hours ago, and he could not admit the almost unpleasant explanation that this was because they were man and woman. Still, he had felt her heart beating upon his breast, and something in his nature had, it seemed to him, awakened and throbbed in response to it. It was, he felt, not sensual passion; it was not love, since it was Grace Coulthurst he loved; and his confusion grew more confounded as he vainly strove to classify it. Ingleby, as one who did the obvious thing, and was usually doing something unless he was asleep, had seldom been led into any attempt to unravel the complexities of human thought and emotion. Men of his temperament are as a rule too busy for anything of the kind. It is material facts that interest them, and their achievements are usually apparent and substantial, written in that country on hard rock and forest or on the orchards and wheatfields that smile where the wilderness has been.
"Well?" said Sewell at length.
Ingleby made a little gesture. "The thing is done. Why I did it doesn't, after all, greatly matter. We have the results of it to face just now."
"Precisely! That's why I'm pleased you chose a very convenient spot to chop the tree in. There's one of them becoming apparent already."
He pointed across the fallen log, and the man who stood upon it made a little sign. The tree was in the shadow, but beyond it lay a narrow strip of moonlit snow, upon which the dusky pines closed in again. A man moved out into the strip, walking cautiously, and carrying a carbine. He stopped abruptly, dropping the butt of it with a little thud, and, turning his head, he apparently glanced at somebody behind him.
"They've chopped a big tree right across the trail," he said.