"Nay," the Comtesse said, "you will not renew it. I," she continued, "have that which should render Emile Francbois harmless. Come," she said now, turning to the other. "Came, follow me some steps farther down the lane. I must speak with you, and at once. Come," she said again, and this time she spoke in a tone that plainly showed she intended to be obeyed--a tone that would have required no great effort of imagination on a listener's part to cause him to suppose that a disobedient dog was being spoken to.
"You are not hurt?" Sylvia asked softly, as she stood alone with Bevill and looked up at him through the density of the night--a density that now, however, the swift rising of the moon was dispersing. "Oh! I pray not."
"In no way," Bracton replied. "He plays well, yet his defence is weak in the extreme--and it may be that the darkness was my friend. But, Sylvia," forgetting his courteous deference for the moment, yet observing, as he recalled himself, that either she had not remarked his utterance of her name, or heeded it not, "but I have left him free--free for harm, for evil."
"I think not. It would appear the Comtesse has some hold over him, knows something that may keep him silent; yet, nevertheless----"
"Yes--nevertheless?"
"We--we must go. Escape! I--we," she went on, speaking tremulously, "are not safe. I am afeard."
"Afeard? You? Yet you have told me the French, even though the worst befall, will not hurt a woman."
"I have changed my thoughts. It is--a--woman's privilege to do so. I would put leagues and leagues betwixt myself--betwixt us--and Liége: betwixt us and all this land ravaged by war and contending armies. I--I--cannot bear to remain here longer. In truth, I fear--I am sick with fear."
Remarking Sylvia's strange agitation, an agitation so strangely new-born, so different from the calm indifference and absence of all apprehension which she had testified when first he reached her, Bevill could not but wonder at the change that had come over her. For now she was but in little more danger--if any--than she had been a week past. There were, it is true, the rumours that the Allies were drawing near, that Kaiserswörth had fallen to them, that Nimeguen had either done so too or was about to do so, that Marlborough was hastening to take chief command of all the forces. Yet what mattered this! She, like every other woman in all the land, in every hemmed-in, beleaguered town and city, was safe from personal violence--safe as a child itself.
"And she knew it," he thought, as he gazed at the outlines of Sylvia's face, now plainly visible in the light cast by the moon through the leafy branches of the great tree. "She knew it, and she knows it still. What is it she fears? What fear has come to her?"