“You see how it is with her?” she said. “She lives by her affections—conversely from her mother, her heart rules her head. You will be gentle with her, won't you, when the wrench comes?”
“My dear,” he said, taking her hand in his and speaking with the quiet solemnity of a man who vows himself before some holy altar, “I shall never forget that she is your child—the child of the woman I love.”
CHAPTER I
A MORNING ADVENTURE
The dewy softness of early morning still hung about the woods, veiling their autumn tints in broken, drifting swathes of pearly mist, while towards the east, where the rising sun pushed long, dim fingers of light into the murky greyness of the sky, a tremulous golden haze grew and deepened.
Little, delicate twitterings vibrated on the air—the sleepy chirrup of awakening birds, the rustle of a fallen leaf beneath the pad of some belated cat stealing back to the domestic hearth, the stir of a rabbit in its burrow.
Presently these sank into insignificance beside a more definite sound—the crackle of dry leaves and the snapping of twigs beneath a heavier footfall than that of any marauding Tom, and through a clearing in the woods slouched the figure of a man, gun on shoulder, the secret of his bulging side-pockets betrayed by the protruding tail feathers of a cock-pheasant.
He was not an attractive specimen of mankind. Beneath the peaked cap, crammed well down on to his head, gleamed a pair of surly, watchful eyes, and, beneath these again, the unshaven, brutal, out-thrust jaw offered little promise of better things.
Nor did his appearance in any way belie his reputation, which was unsavory in the extreme. Indeed, if report spoke truly, “Black Brady,” as he was commonly called, had on one occasion only escaped the gallows thanks to the evidence of a village girl—one who had loved him recklessly, to her own undoing. Every one had believed her evidence to be false, but, as she had stuck to what she said through thick and thin, and as no amount of cross-examination had been able to shake her, Brady had contrived to slip through the hands of the police.