“We may find it difficult to reach Gand, so I’ll wait for you in Ostend, Arthur,” she said composedly.
Now, these two young people had just been snatched from death, or worse, in a manner which, a few weeks earlier, the least critical reader of romantic fiction would have denounced as so wildly improbable that imagination boggled at it. Irene, too, had unmistakably told the man who had never uttered a word of the love that was consuming him that neither rank nor wealth could interpose any barrier between them. It was hard, almost unbearable, that they should be parted in the very hour when freedom might truly come with the dawn.
Dalroy trudged a good twenty paces before he dared trust his voice. Even then, he blurted out, not the measured agreement which his brain dictated, but a prayer from his very heart. “May God bless and guard you, dear!” was what he said, and Irene’s response was choked by a pitiful little sob.
Suddenly Dalroy, whose hearing was quickened by the training of Indian shikar, touched the corporal’s arm, and stood fast. Bates gave a peculiar click in his throat, and the squad halted, each man’s feet remaining in whatever position they happened to be at the moment.
“Horses coming this way,” breathed Dalroy.
“Right, sir. This’ll be your two, with Jan wot’s-his-name, I hope. Leave them to us, sir.—Smithy, Macdonald, and Shiner—forward!”
Three shapes materialised close to the trio in front. The rain was still pelting down, and the trees nearly met overhead, so the road was discernible only by a strip of skyline, itself merely a less dense blackness.
“Them two Yewlans,” explained the corporal, “probably bringing a prisoner. Mind you don’t hurt him.”
No more explicit instructions were given or needed. Of such material were the First Hundred Thousand.