Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance.
“I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.”
There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice—the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere.
“You’ll house one of them—the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey—keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.”
“All’s fair in love and war—as I told you before,” he retorted.
“Geoffrey”—indignantly.
“Jean!”—mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”
The car swung round a sharp bend and then bumped its way up a roughly-made track which served to link a species of cobbled yard, constructed at one side of the bungalow, to the road along which they had come.
The track cleaved its way, rather on the principle of a railway cutting, clean through the abrupt acclivity which flanked the road that side, and rising steeply between crumbling, overhanging banks, fringed with coarse grass and tufted with straggling patches of gorse and heather, debouched on to a broad plateau. Here the road below was completely hidden from view; on all sides there stretched only a limitless vista of wild moorland, devoid of any sign of habitation save for the bare, creeperless walls of the bungalow itself.
As the scene unfolded, Jean became suddenly conscious of a strange sense of familiarity. An inexplicable impress sion of having seen the place on some previous occasion, of familiarity with every detail of it—even to a recognition of its peculiar atmosphere of loneliness—took possession of her. For a moment she could not place the memory. Only she knew that it was associated in her mind with something disagreeable. Even now, as, at Burke’s dictation, she waited in the car while he entered the bungalow from the back, passing through in order to admit his guest by way of the front door, which had been secured upon the inside, she was aware of a feeling of intense repugnance.