John Cobb crossed himself. “Like she be a sorceress, too—”
Morgen stepped from the thorn to the side of the big grey horse. She met blue eyes with dark eyes. Her lips smiled, her eyes and under her eyes. “Oh, the saints!” she said. “I can but be glad to see you, lad! You are no telltale! Can you teach your man to be none either?”
“I can that. But Morgen Fay, how did you grow here?”
He swung himself down from his horse and stood beside her. John Cobb gaped. “Send him a little away,” she said, “but do not let him out of sight. This world’s a danger-bush where the thorn is always near the may!”
They talked. “Do you remember that foggy day when you climbed through window? I have not seen you since! I like you, though not the way that all expect. I wish I might have had you for brother. Well, they would stone me—burn me, maybe—in the market place, Father Edmund preaching over me! I dwell at the ruined farm.”
Intelligence flashed between them. “Somerville saved you—put you here. I think the better of him!” He spoke sturdily, a young spiritual adventurer.
She looked at him with eyes that seemed to have considered a myriad matters. She sighed—she stretched her arms in a yearning gesture in the dim gulf of the world into which the wood seemed to have turned. “It is away to London! Maybe I shall never again see you nor Somerville nor Montjoy, who is too good now to be seen close, nor Middle Forest High Street that I danced in when I was a little girl, nor my house that I liked, though often was I wretched in it! Nor my garden that the old wall mothered, nor river that I listened to and listened to. Well, tide and time we run away! But where we run to, that is a question for a wise man! They say that we run to heaven or to hell—and I shouldn’t dare say my road was the first!”
Without warning Thomas Bettany found himself priest. “If you’ve strayed into wrong road, turn and take the other! You’ve got more than you think of the other in you now. Turn, Morgen!” He regarded her with a sudden startled face. “By the rood! It’s the Great Adventure.”
She looked at him with more of the thorn in her face than the bloom. From beyond an oak came John Cobb’s warning voice. “Some one’s coming! Two or three!”