"In all that touches not my vow I will help you two!" she thought, as she looked at them. For true love came closer to her than anything else in the world.
"There is no sign of Max," she said aloud, to break the first silence of constraint; "perhaps he has waited at the landing-place on the mainland till the storm should abate—though that were scarce like him, either."
She sat down, with one large movement of her arm casting her wet cloak over the back of a wooden settle, which fronted a fireplace where green pine knots crackled and explosive jets of steam rushed spitefully outwards into the hall with a hissing sound.
"You have been down at the landing-place—on such a night?" said Joan, with some remains of that curious awkwardness which marks the interruption of a more interesting conversation.
"Yes," said Theresa, smiling indulgently (for she had been in like case—such a great while ago, when her brothers used to intrude). "Yes, I have been at the landing-place. But as yet the storm is nothing, though the waves will be fierce enough if Max Ulrich is coming home with a laden boat to pull in the wind's eye."
It mattered little what she said. She had helped them to pass the bar, and the conversation could now proceed over smooth waters.
Yet there is no need to report it. Joan and Conrad remained and spoke they scarce knew what, all for the pleasure of eye answering eye, and the subtle flattery of voices that altered by the millionth of a tone each time they answered each other. Theresa spoke vaguely but sufficiently, and allowed herself to dream, till to her yearning gaze honest, sturdy Werner grew misty and his bluff figure resolved itself into that one nobler and more kingly which for years had fronted her at the table's end where now the chief captain sat.
Meanwhile Jorian and Boris exchanged meaning and covert glances, asking each other when this dull dinner parade would be over, so that they might loosen leathern points, undo buttons, and stretch legs on benches with a tankard of ale at each right elbow, according to the wont of stout war-captains not quite so young as they once were.
Thus they were sitting when there came a clamour at the outer door, the noise of voices, then a soldier's challenge, and, on the back of that, Max Ulrich's weird answer—a sound almost like the howl of a wolf cut off short in his throat by the hand that strangles him.
"There he is at last!" cried all in the dining-hall of the grange.