"I will," she answered fervently. "I would do anything to save him." She looked at her watch, and rose from the seat under the hawthorn. "It is nearly two o'clock," she said, "and I must go back to the house. You will come to luncheon, of course?"
"Thanks—no. I have an engagement that will take me back to the town immediately."
"But Mr. Granger will be surprised to hear that you have been here without calling upon him."
"Need Mr. Granger hear of my coming?" George Fairfax asked in a low tone.
Clarissa flushed scarlet.
"I have no secrets from my husband, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "even about trifles."
"Ten thousand pardons! I scarcely want to make my presence here a secret; but, in short, I came solely to speak to you about a subject in which I knew you were deeply interested, and I had not contemplated calling upon Mr. Granger."
They were walking slowly up the grassy slope as they talked; and after this there came a silence, during which Clarissa quickened her pace a little, George Fairfax keeping still by her side. Her heart beat faster than its wont; and she had a vague sense of danger in this man's presence—a sense of a net being woven round her, a lurking suspicion that this apparent interest in her brother veiled some deeper feeling.
They came out of the hollow, side by side, into a short arcade of flowering limes, at the end of which there was a broad sweep of open grass. A man on a deep-chested strong-limbed gray horse was riding slowly towards them across the grass—Daniel Granger.
That picture of his wife walking in the little avenue of limes, with George Fairfax by her side, haunted Mr. Granger with a strange distinctness in days to come,—the slight white-robed figure against the background of sunlit greenery; the young man's handsome head, uncovered, and stooping a little as he spoke to his companion.