"What's that?" exclaimed Amaryllis, stopping and listening.
They were not more than three hundred yards from the point where the road began to rise from the broad, level space of the moor spreading on both sides of the old paved causeway in firm, close-nibbled grass, interspersed with tufts of ling and heather, varied by rarer clumps of gorse.
Not within a hundred yards in any direction could Dick find possible cover from eyes descending the Bull's Neck.
The pair stood motionless, their hearts in their ears.
What they heard was unmistakable.
"A motor," said Amaryllis. "It's coming down."
She laid a hand on his shoulder, lifting her face to him.
When he raised his own from it, it was to watch the point where the descending road took its last bend in the passage by which it had traversed the ridge: the point where the approaching car must appear.
With flushed face and unflinching eyes, Amaryllis stood beside her lover, her right hand still lying light on his shoulder, her sun-bonnet fallen back, and the beauty of hair and features open to the coming enemy.
As the blue car pushed its nose round the corner, and, turning, made straight for the lower plateau, she glanced at Dick's face once more; to see there an impersonal serenity which she might have found inhuman, had she been a mere spectator of the drama which was coming. Being, however, one of its persons, she felt herself enwrapped, and uplifted from fear by the consciousness that a calm mind and a swift brain were supporting each other in her service.