“Do you—are you fond of the girl?” said she and now it was he who was in the chair and she was bending over him.
“Do I not?” he cried, sudden and passionate lest his confidence should fail. “Ay, with all my heart.”
“Poor Gilian!” said she.
“Yes, poor Gilian!” he repeated bitterly, thinking on all that lay between him and the girl of his devotion. Now, if ever, was the time to tell the real object of his visit, how that those old surmisers upstairs were wider of the mark than the innkeeper, and that the person for whom the hunt was up through half the shire was sequestered in the lonely shealing hut on the moor of Karnes.
“I am sorry,” she went on, and there was no mistake about it, for her grief was in her face. “I am sorry, but you must forget, my dear. It is easy—sometimes—to forget, Gilian; you must be just throng with work and duty, and by-and-by you’ll maybe wonder at yourself having been in the notion of Nan Gordon’s daughter, made like her mother (and God bless her!) for the vexation of youth, but never for sober satisfaction. I am wae for you, Gilian, and I cannot help you, though I would tramp from here to Carlisle in my bauchles if it would bring her to you.”
“You maybe would not need to go so far,” he answered abruptly. “There is a hut behind the hill there, and neither press nor fire nor candle nor companion in it, and Nan—Miss Nan, is waiting there for me to go back to her, and here I’m wasting precious hours. Do you not see that I’m burning like a fire?”
“And you have the girl in the moor?” she cried incredulously.
“That I have!” he answered, struck by the absolute possession her sentence suggested. “I have her there. I took her there. I took her from her father’s home. She came willingly, and there she is, for me!”
He held out his arms with a gesture indescribable, elate, nervous with his passion. “Auntie, think of it: you mind her eyes and her hair, yon turn of the neck, and her song? They’re mine, I’m telling you.”
“I mind them in her mother,” said the little lady, stunned by this intelligence. “I mind them in her mother, and they were not at all, in her, for those who thought they were for them. This—this is a terrible thing, Gilian,” she said piteously.