“Can your horse take you all the way home again tonight?” she said, presently.
“I think so. If not, I dare say I can put up for the night at Beverley’s farm,” he said, carelessly, adding, with a slight change of tone, “our old quarters.”
The allusion, somehow, made Mary feel nervous again. In her eagerness to change the subject she flung herself off Scylla into Charybdis—in homelier terms, “out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
“Do you know what came into my head when I first saw you driving so fast up that lane?” she said with a slight laugh.
“No,” he replied. “You did not know who it was. I think you first fancied I was Dr Brandreth, did you not?”
“I thought it just possible. But that is not what I meant. I could not help having a foolish wild sort of fancy that perhaps you were Sir Ingram de Romary—you know the story?”
“The fellow that pitched himself over the Chaldron Falls,” said Mr Cheviott. “Yes, I remember. Your fancies about me are the reverse of complimentary, do you know, Miss Western? The last time you had any such, if I remember right, you took me for the ghost of that other still more disreputable Romary, the fellow that forced an unfortunate ‘heathen Chinee’ girl to marry him, and then abused her so that she threw herself out of the window of the haunted room.”
“Mr Cheviott!” said Mary, reproachfully, her cheeks glowing at the remembrance of that day.
And Mr Cheviott was merciful enough to say no more.
They drove back to Hathercourt very fast. So fast that when they drew up at the Rectory gates there was as yet no sound of Dr Brandreth’s wheels in the distance.