She did not reply that love might close the girl’s mouth. But she knew that it was possible. Instead:
“Maybe she’ll not,” she repeated. “If she did not come on purpose—and then they’d be here by now—it will take her half an hour to go back to the inn, and she’ll have to find Bishop, and he’ll have to get a few together. We’ve an hour good, and if it were night, you might be clear of this and safe at Tyson’s in ten minutes.”
“But now?” he cried, with a gesture of wrathful impatience. “It’s daylight, and maybe the house is watched. What am I to do now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And it was noticeable that she was cool, while he was excited to the verge of tears, and was not a mile from hysterics. “It was for this I’ve been fooling Tyson—to get a safe hiding-place. But if you could get there, I doubt if he is quite ripe. I’d like to commit him a bit more before we trust him.”
“Then why play the fool with him?” he answered savagely.
“Because a day or two more and his hiding-hole may be the saving of you,” she retorted. “Sho!” shrugging her shoulders in her turn, “the game is not played to an end yet! She’ll not tell! She is proud as horses, and if she gives you up she’ll have to swear against you. And she’ll not stomach that, the little pink and white fool. She’ll keep mum, my lad!”
The hand with which he wiped the beads of sweat from his brow shook.
“But it she does tell?” he muttered. “If she does tell?”
She did not answer as she might have answered. She did not remind him of those stories of hair-breadth escapes and of coolness in the shadow of the gallows, which, as much as his plausible enthusiasm, had won her wild heart. She did not hint that his present carriage was hardly at one with them. For when women love, their eyes are slow to open, and this man had revealed to Bess a new world—a world of rarest possibilities, a world in which she and her like were to have justice, if not vengeance—a world in which the mighty were to fall from their seats, and the poor to be no more flouted by squires’ wives and parsons’ daughters! If she did not still think him all golden, if the feet and even the legs of clay were beginning to be visible, there was glamour about him still. The splendid plans, the world-embracing schemes with which he had dazzled her, had shrunk indeed into a hole-and-corner effort to save his own skin. But his life was as dear to her as to himself; and doubtless, by-and-by, when this troublesome crisis was past, the vista would widen. She was content. She was glad to put full knowledge from her, glad of any pretext to divert her own mind and his.
“Lord, I had forgotten!” she cried, after a gloomy pause, “I’ve a letter! There was one at last!” She searched in her clothes for it.