For only answer she took up his thin right hand and laid it against her cheek; and then she crept quickly away, moving almost soundlessly along, for she knew every turn of the little wood.
At last she came back, panting a little.
“Who was it?” he whispered eagerly.
“I don’t know. They’re gone now. But I’ve not a minute left.”
He could hear by her voice that she was anxious, preoccupied, and with the strange, dangerous power he possessed of seeing into a woman’s mind he knew that she had not told the truth—that she was well aware of the identity of those other haunters of the enchanted wood. But he had no wish to share her knowledge. The good folk of Terriford, who meant so much to Lucy Warren, meant less than nothing to Guy Cheale.
“You and that tiresome old cook go up to bed as soon as you come in, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes, we do,” she replied hesitatingly, knowing well, as she would have expressed it to herself, what he was after.
“If I give you twenty minutes,” he whispered caressingly, “it will be quite safe for you to let me into the drawing room, eh—little hawk?”
It was his supreme term of endearment—and once more she allowed him to take her into his arms, and press her with an almost terrible strength to his breast. But——
“It’s wrong,” she whispered, “it’s wrong, Mr. Cheale. I ought never to have let you into the drawing room. ’Tain’t mine to use that way.”