“Not quite so quick, my pretty Lucy!”
Guy Cheale was panting painfully—and a rush of that pity which is akin to love filled Lucy Warren’s heart.
“I mustn’t be late,” she said nervously.
“You’re not late, Lucy”—he held up his watch close to his eyes. “It’s only twenty to ten,” and then he added, in that voice which he knew how to make at once so strangely tender, persuasive, and yes—mocking, “Let’s go into our enchanted wood for five minutes, as you won’t let me in to that drawing room of yours.”
“It ain’t my drawing room, as you knows full well. If it was, you’d be welcome to come into it,” she exclaimed resentfully.
He guided her down the path leading to the wood, and then, once they were under the shelter of the trees, he clutched her to him with a strength which at once frightened and comforted her—for it seemed to prove that he could not be as ill as he was made out to be.
“Love and life,” he muttered, “the one’s no good without the other!” He bent his head and their lips clung together in a long long kiss.
And then Guy Cheale was filled with a delicious sense of triumph and of exultation. He had won this proud sensitive creature at last—after a long, to him a breathless, exciting chase.
But all at once he felt her stiffen in his arms.
“Hush!” she whispered. “There’s some one in the wood!”