Presently other objects made themselves out against the steel-washed dusk. Neither were they unfamiliar, since a right-of-way, which for a century had vexed the souls of the owners of Stillington, intersected at about halfway between the Dower House and the Manor the path he was pursuing. The objects in question were the figures of a man and woman standing in the middle of the public footway, which held a transverse course across the park, and just outside the shade of a copse.
There was no reason why the couple should not be any pair of village lovers—of his own servants taking loitering farewell at the crossing of the ways. Yet Edward quickened his pace. The added proximity of fifty yards told him that the man’s figure was elderly and bulky, and that he was holding the wrists of his slender companion against her will. Both were talking with such vehemence and concentration of gesture as to be absolutely unconscious of anything outside themselves.
A horrible suspicion, with the strength of almost a certainty, first stopped the observer’s feet stock still, then fevered them into a run. At the same moment a little voyaging cloud, thick enough momentarily to hide her, wholly covered the moon, and when it had swept past the man had disappeared, and the girl was running away in the direction of the Manor, with all the fleetness of which a very light body and longish legs were capable.
In two minutes her pursuer had overtaken her. She stopped, panting, and said gaspingly—
“Oh, it is you! I am thankful to see you! I—I—have—had—such a fright!”
For once he could not doubt that she was speaking truth. Her eyes were full of terror, and her breath came in little dry sobs.
“Yes?”
“I—I had taken Jock out for a run—you—you know how he teases one. By-the-by, where is he? He must have run after a rabbit.”
Alas! she was off the lines again. Her hearer knew perfectly that the innocent Jock had not shared her mysterious evening promenade. His heart turned to stone against her, or at all events he thought so, and she had to continue her lame narrative unhelped by any expression of interest or belief in it.
“I had just reached that cross-path, when a man—you saw that a man was talking to me—jumped out of the trees. I had never seen him before, and—and—began to—to beg of me.”