"Were you calling me, sir?"
A voice behind him made him start. The postman had come out of the darkness and stood at his elbow.
"I thought I heard you shout 'Winkworth' when I was far up the hill. Anything you want, Mus' Furlonger?"
"Yes—yes—would you take this telegram to Dormans, and see it sent off? Here's a bob...."
His voice sounded vague, somehow, as if it were a mechanical process unconnected with his real self. He stood watching the old postman as he climbed the stile and took the turning for Dormans, where the track divided. A minute later a figure became silhouetted against the sky on his right; the path to Cowden and the valley farms dipped abruptly a few yards beyond the stile, then climbed to the high grounds near Goatsluck Wood. Quentin Lowe was clearly visible as he hurried away towards Kent—almost as if he feared pursuit.
Leonard stared after him, his eyes bright with hate and fever. A kind of delirium was in his brain as he watched that thick-set, slouching figure, caricatured into a dwarf by his fury and the cheverel light. Then suddenly he bounded forward.
He forgot all about the illness that was creeping over him, and Janey alone in the dark house. Or rather, he told himself that he would be up with Quentin in a minute, and would have settled him in a couple more. He would drag him back to Sparrow Hall by the scruff of the neck, and Janey, poor, outraged Janey, should be his judge, and taste triumph even in her despair.
He climbed the stile and ran up the path, plunging recklessly through the tall, ghostly buttercups, glowing faintly in the twilight. He had soon lost the path, a mere borstall, and was trampling the hay-grass, but he did not slack.
Quentin had for the moment disappeared. The trees of Goatsluck Wood waved against the sky: Len was conscious of a kind of illusion as he approached them—it seemed as if they were very far away, then suddenly he found himself on the tangled rim of the wood, the boughs shuddering and rustling over him, as he groped his way into the darkness.
He had to run along the hedge till he found the stile, and he realised that Lowe now had a good start. But he would not stop, nor defer his vengeance to another, more auspicious, day. Janey would probably not wake till the next morning—and meantime his blood was up. He was not quite sure what he should do to Quentin when he overtook him—he was not worth killing, that would only mean more sorrow for Janey, but he had ideas of pounding him more or less to a jelly and then dragging him back to Sparrow Hall and making him kiss the ground at Janey's feet, and grovel and slobber for her forgiveness, with other humiliations which he did not think for a minute his sister would not enjoy.