Mr. Foxcroft undertook to pilot us. As I rode by his side I could scarce believe that, yonder, close at hand in the darkness, Silver Heels slept, nor doubted that I was near. My heart began a-drumming.
"You are sure she is there?" I asked, plucking Foxcroft's sleeve.
"Unless Captain Butler has prevailed," he said, grimly.
I choked and trembled in my saddle.
"Do you—do you believe she would listen to him?" I muttered.
"Do you?" he asked, turning on me.
We forced our horses through a belt of tasselled willows fringing a little thread of a meadow stream. The dew showered our faces like a flurry of rain. My cheeks were burning.
"How far is it? Are we near her house?" I asked again and again. I strove to realize that I was nearing Silver Heels; I could not, nor was I able to understand that I should ever again see her.
In moments of my imprisonment I had believed devoutly that I should live to see her; yet since my deliverance from that cage of stones I had not dared assure myself that I should find her; I had not given myself time to think of the chances that might favour me or of the possibilities of failure. Dormant among my bitter memories lay that vile threat of Walter Butler; I dared not stir it up to examine it; I let it lie quiet, afraid to rouse it. By what hellish art could he, my mortal enemy, inspire aught but hatred in the woman who had loved me and who must have known how I had suffered at his hands?
Yet, if he had not lied to me, she had at least given him an audience. But his boast that she had consented to fix a day to wed with him I believed not, deeming it but a foolish attempt at cruelty on a man who, truly enough, at that time, seemed doomed to die upon the gibbet behind Queen Street court-house.