"Wherefore to London, sweet?" asked Guy. "Were we not safer far afield? Why seek the shadow of the Tower?"
"One way is left thee," said she, with intense earnestness. "A way that is known to me alone. Thereby only canst thou escape. Oh, trust me—trust me, dear heart! Only I can guide thee to safety and to freedom!"
"On, my Mary!" he cried, gayly. "Lead on! Thou art my star!"
For the moment both forgot the danger behind them. The intoxication of an ideal and self-forgetting trust—a merger of all else in tenderness—flooded their souls and passed back and forth between them in their mutual glances.
Then came that pursuing shout again, much nearer than before, and with a shock the two lovers remembered their true plight.
Sir Guy reined in his steed.
"Halt—halt, Mary!" he commanded. "We must conceal us here in this dell till that these fellows pass us. Then back to London by the way we came. There is no other road."
Obedient now in her turn, Phœbe drew rein and followed her lover up the bed of a small stream which crossed the road at this point. Behind a curtain of trees they waited, and ere long saw their two pursuers dart past them and disappear in a cloud of dust down the road.
"They will stop at the next dwelling to ask news of us, and thus learn of our evasion," said Guy. "The chase has but begun. Come, sweet, let us hasten southward again."
Darkness had now begun to fall in earnest, and as the two fugitives passed the Peacock Inn, no one saw them.