“Where’s Bishop?”
“He has gone with a party to Lady Holm. There’s an idea that the isles were not thoroughly searched in the first place. But he should be back immediately.”
A slight hardening of the lines of the mouth was Clyne’s only answer. He helped Henrietta to alight, and was turning with her to enter the house, when he remembered himself. He laid his hand on the chaplain’s arm.
“This is the gentleman,” he said, “whom you have to thank for your release, Henrietta.”
“I am sure,” she said, “that I am greatly obliged to him.” But her tone was cold.
“He did everything,” Clyne said. “He left no stone unturned. Let me do him the justice of saying that we two must share the blame of what has happened, while the whole credit is his.”
“I am very much obliged to him,” she said again. And she bowed.
And that was all. That, and a look which told him that she resented his interference, that she hated to be beholden to him, that she held him linked for ever with her humiliation. He, and he alone, had stood by her two days before, when all had been against her, and Captain Clyne had been as flint to her. He, and he alone, had wrought out her deliverance and reinstated her. And her thanks were a haughty movement of the head, two sentences as cold as the wintry day, a smile as hard as the icicles that still depended in the shade of the eaves. And when she had spoken, she walked to the door without another glance—and every step was on the poor man’s heart.
Mrs. Gilson had come down two steps to meet her. She had seen all.
“Well, you’re soon back, miss?” she said. “Some have the luck all one way.”