Though he, the silent, solitary figure sitting beside the pool is but ten paces from her, yet she hesitates, half a score of times, making a timorous step and then pausing before the next, her blue eyes filled, now with mischief and love and now clouded by some fear. And then suddenly she makes a brave little run to him and drops lightly on her knees behind him and lifts her hands and clasps them over his eyes.
"And you—you would leave your Betty? Oh, Allan, you would leave your Betty who loves you and go away to the cruel wars?" she sobs.
He has taken her hands, has taken them strongly in his hold and holding them yet, he turns to her. "Why did you come, why did you come to me, Betty?"
"Because," and the blue eyes are lifted to his filled with an innocence and candour that even he, jealous and despairing though he is, cannot but recognise, "because I do love thee so and cannot let thee go!"
"And why, loving me, Betty, do you suffer the kisses of such a man as Timothy Burnand, a rascally tinker and a thieving poacher, a man whose hand I would not have touch thee, Betty?"
Into her face there flames a great flush, a look of anger, then it dies out and the laughter comes rippling to her lips and into her eyes come back the mischief and the love and a little pride too, for she realises that he is jealous of her, this man she loves and though jealousy be a sin, yet it is not without its sweetness, too, for say what the wiseacres may, jealously is oftentimes a proof of love.
"And you saw—" she cries, "Allan, you—saw—ugh!" She makes a little gesture, a little grimace. "Did you think that I invited, that I welcomed him? Did you think that I bore his kiss with patience? Go and seek him now and look for the red mark upon his face! He came on me unawares and then all suddenly—" she pauses. "Allan," she says pleadingly, "Allan, you will not go, you will not go, my dear, you will not go and leave me?" And sobbing she is in his arms. And so for Allan Pringle the sun shines out again and the flowers are blooming brightly and the little slim maiden of stone from the centre of the pool seems to throw the glittering water higher and yet higher into the air as though in joy that all is well between these two, who hold one another so tightly, who are mingling their tears and their laughter and their kisses, now that the cloud has passed.
* * * * *
There are no flowers in the garden now, for the garden of Homewood Manor and all the world beside lies under a pall of white, for the winter is here, the winter of seventeen hundred and five, which is remembered by all men as a winter of bitter cold, of great frosts and heavy snows.
In a tiny cottage that stands a bare quarter of a mile on the Stretton Road from the Homewood gates, a man is on his knees beside a bed.