"It's a quarter to three," he said. "If we missed that train at five-fifteen, we should have to wait till ten for the next."
"And it'd be much safer," Amaryllis broke in, "to wait on the moor, than in a village or a station where people could see us."
"Yes. I'm not clear-headed enough now to see into Melchard's mind, but I can still calculate on what I know. If he didn't suspect us, he'll go the round of his pickets, beginning with Gallowstree Dip. If he did suspect, he'll come this way after us, and run down towards the London road and look across the moor, along the Drovers' Track from the hawthorns and the white stone. He won't see us—we are in a fold till we get a mile further at least. He'll go on towards the main road, but when he meets his picket that nobody like us two has passed, he'll come back and try the Drovers' Track."
"He didn't suspect," insisted the girl.
"We'll bank on that, then," said Dick, "—if we can find a bush or a ditch to hide in."
The faint path they were following here reached the lowest point of the depression which hid them from the road and from the cottage by whose back door they had left it, and soon began to rise.
The ascent, as they topped it, proved, however, to be concerned merely with crossing a spur, below which the path wound about the edge of a bowl-shaped hollow, rimmed and lined with dark-green, close-cropped grass; and at the bottom lay a tiny tarn.
So steep were the sides that a broad band of green was reflected to the eyes bent down upon the still water. And this circle of mirrored green, embracing a disc of the sky's azure, stared up at them like a pupil-less blue eye.
"Oh!" exclaimed Amaryllis, "it's a sapphire set in emerald!"
Down a winding path, vague as a wrinkle on a young face, and worn, said Amaryllis, by ghostly hoofs of departed sheep, they crept to the pool's edge.