"It's the truth! I swear it is! They were just across when you came!" Lane cried. "They can't be fifty yards from the bank! If they'd moved I should have seen them. Let me up, and I'll help you to find them."
"Tie him up," Hawkesworth cried. "Tie him up. And if he's lied to us, we shall soon know. If we don't find them, we'll drop him in the water. Tell him that, and ask him again."
"They're by yon!" Lane cried. "I swear they are!"
Sophia felt, she could not see, that Hawkesworth was peering round him. Even now he was not more than ten or twelve paces from them; but the gorse-bush, from which the rabbit had darted, formed a black blurr against the fence, and deepened the obscurity in which they lay. Unless he came on them they were safe; but at any moment he might discover the fence, and guess it had brought them up, and beat along it. And--and while she thought of this she heard him chuckle.
"Be still, man," he cried to the other, "and keep your ears open. The moon will be over the hill in five minutes, and we'll have them safe, if they are here. Meantime, stand and listen, will you? or they may creep off."
Sophia swallowed a sob. It seemed so hard--so hard after all they had done to escape--that nature itself should turn against them. Yet, it was so; the man was right. Already the moonlight touched the crest of a gorse-bush that grew a little higher than its neighbours; and overhead the sky was growing bright where the ridge line cut it. In five minutes the disc of the moon, sailing high, would rise above that spot, and all the hill side, that now lay veiled in shadow, would be flooded with light. Then----
She shuddered, watching paralysed the oncoming of this new and inexorable foe. Slowly the light was creeping down the gorse-bush. Minute by minute, sure as the tide that surges to the lips of the stranded mariner, the pale rays silvered this spray and that spray, dark before; touched the fence, and now lay a narrow streak along the nearer margin of the stream. And the streak widened; not slowly now but quickly. Even while she watched it, from the shelter of the fence, feeling her heart beat sickening bumps against her side, the light crept nearer and nearer. In three or four minutes it would be upon them.
Sophia was brave, but there was something in the sure and stealthy approach of this danger that sapped her will, and robbed her limbs of strength. Unable to think, unable to act, she crouched panic-stricken where she was; as the hare surprised in her form awaits the hunter's hand. Until only a minute remained; then with a groan she shook off the spell. To run, even to be caught running, was better than to be taken so. But whither could they run with the least chance of escape? She turned her head to see, and her eyes, despairing, climbed the slope behind her until they rested on the faint yellow spark that, solemn and unchanged, shone from the window of the dark house on the crest.
That way lay some chance, a desperate chance. She warned Lady Betty by a touch. "We must run!" she breathed in the girl's ear. "Look at the fence, and when I tap your shoulder, climb over, and run to the house!"
Lady Betty disengaged herself softly and nodded. Then, as if she was granted some new insight into the character of the woman whose arms were round her, as if she saw more clearly than before the other's courage, and understood the self-denial that gave her the first and better chance, she drew Sophia's face to her, and clinging to her, kissed it. Then she crouched, waiting, waiting, her eyes on the fence.