He had almost stumbled in his haste and perplexity upon another figure all cloaked in waterproof and sheltered under an umbrella near the Rectory gate. By this time it was quite dark, and the rain, small and soft but persistent, had increased so much as to be almost blinding. A faint exclamation—‘Oh, Mr. Swinford!’—greeted him as he was passing.
‘Miss Plowden,’ he said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and then he added, breathlessly, ‘I am running after a lady—don’t laugh—an old friend of whom I had a sudden glimpse. I have pursued her all the way from the lake, and thought I had kept her well in sight, but at last I have lost the track. Have you met any one? Excuse me for keeping you in the rain.’
‘A lady?’ said Emmy. ‘No, I have seen no one—that is, no one that is not well known in Watcham. I suppose it was a stranger?’
‘How can I tell?’ said Leo in his perplexity; ‘a slight woman, exceedingly swift and energetic—witness, I have not been able to make up with her all this way—in a cloak—impermeable—what do you call it?—like what you wear.’
‘In a waterproof!’ said Emmy. ‘No one has passed me but the schoolmistress. It could not be the schoolmistress?’
The idea was so ludicrous to Leo that he burst into a laugh in the midst of his wretchedness and perplexity.
‘That does not seem likely,’ he said.
‘No one else has passed,’ said Emmy; ‘but there are some lanes, if the lady had wanted a short cut to the station, for instance.’
‘That is exactly what I should expect.’
‘Then if you will turn down to the right the first opening you come to, and afterwards to the left, and then—— The quickest way,’ she said suddenly, with a blush and a laugh, ‘would be to show you; for I fear I am not clever enough to describe it.’