"Ma lass and self, miss," said Bunce, between gulps, "be footin' it to Harthborough Junction. Bain't there a train, five summat wi' another five in it?"
"Five fifteen," said the girl. "Lunnon way."
"That'll be it. We're takin' 't easy-like o'er moor. Now, Ah do call to mind there be a track to left, some way down t' ro'd, as'll take 'ee gentle and pleasant 'tween two gradely hummocks down into Harthborough. But how far out o' Ecclesthorpe that track takes off the pike, I can't bring to mind. 'Tis not a ro'd proper but indistink like an' wanderin'. So Ah be feared o' missin' it."
"T' owd Drovers' Track, tha meanst. 'Tis easy findin'," said the girl. "Thou turn'st off to left by two thorns wi' a white stone by root o' t' girt 'un. But they stand a long mile down t' road. Now, if 'ee likes to go through house an' cross t' paddock, Ah'll put 'ee in sheep path that'll take thee to Drovers' Track where un runs up 'tween t' rocks—Bull's Neck, they call it."
When they had finished their tea, and Dick, from the sweetstuff counter, had crammed into already burdened pockets two half-pound packets of chocolate, the girl led them to the further gate of her father's paddock, whence she indicated the highest point of the ridge over which "T' owd Drovers' Track" threaded its way.
"Howd eyes on t' lofty knob of 'un," she said, "and thou'lt not stray."
For two or three hundred yards the pair walked in silence; and now that terror had passed with the imminence of danger, and that no strange eyes surrounded her for which she must play a part not learned nor rehearsed, the terrible pressure which had brought Amaryllis so close to her companion was relaxed—not annihilated, but withdrawn to lurk in sky and air, instead of squeezing the very life and breath out of her physical body.
Dick, therefore, though not two feet from her side, seemed all at once a hundred miles away. The man whose arm had held her, and whose coat she had rubbed her face against, she now found herself too shy to touch or speak to. Yet she wished to hear his voice, and even more, longed to feel that he was really there—the same man, no other than she had found him.
She fixed her eyes upon him, hoping he would feel them and respond—help her somehow to bridge this silly gulf. But he strode on, at a pace which made her run lest she should fall behind.
His eyes were set straight forward, his head a little bent. No smoke came from the pipe in his mouth, and the whole expression of face and figure was of dogged endurance. A little trickle of blood had started afresh from the wound on his cheek. She wondered what had set it flowing again. Could it have been some clumsiness of her own in her convulsive clinging to him?