His thin lips were parted in a smile that softened wondrously the harshness of his face, and his eyes seemed then to her alight with kindness. A moment's pause there was, during which she sought her voice, and when she had found it, all that she could falter was:
“Sir, how came you here? They told me that you rode to London.”
“Why, so I did. But on the road I chanced to halt, and having halted I discovered reason why I should return.”
He had discovered a reason. She asked herself breathlessly what might that reason be, and finding herself no answer to the question, she put it next to him.
He drew near to her before replying. “May I sit with you awhile, Cynthia?”
She moved aside to make room for him, as though the broad cliff had been a narrow ledge, and with the sigh of a weary man finding a resting-place at last, he sank down beside her.
There was a tenderness in his voice that set her pulses stirring wildly. Did she guess aright the reason that had caused him to break his journey and return? That he had done so—no matter what the reason—she thanked God from her inmost heart, as for a miracle that had saved him from the doom awaiting him in London town.
“Am I presumptuous, child, to think that haply the meditation in which I found you rapt was for one, unworthy though he be, who went hence but some few days since?”
The ambiguous question drove every thought from her mind, filling it to overflowing with the supreme good of his presence, and the frantic hope that she had read aright the reason of it.
“Have I conjectured rightly?” he asked, since she kept silence.