There was very little said on that riverward walk. Ellen was thinking sadly of the many times she had met and talked with the young stranger, of which she dared not speak to her companion, and of how foolish she had been to run such risks. She was thinking, too, of Dian being down there, and wondering with a vague jealousy if Dian had also been there when she knew it not, and if she too was courting the admiration of the officer. But she put this away in a moment, for she would not do Dian the injustice to suppose that with all her proud and self-centered spirit, she could deliberately do such a criminal, deceitful thing as that would be. She forgot to designate her own conduct as severely as she was doing the faintly supposed conduct of her friend. But, then, Dian was such an eminently proper young woman that no one ever suspected, much less accused her of doing anything unladylike or at all imprudent.
As for poor John Stevens, he had been laboring for years, ever since he had been a man, with a man's understanding of life and its responsibilities, for the acquisition of the severe self-control necessary to subdue his passionate nature. He had fought such a gallant fight against his love for Diantha Winthrop, that no one, not even Dian herself, suspected the profound emotions which had been so hard for him to control. He had learned to control his temper, that fierce, vicious thing, which his dead sainted mother had trained him from early youth to hold in check; about which he had often prayed, aye, and even fasted, that it might never rise beyond his power of government; but now, indeed, when he felt both love and anger flooding his soul in such an overwhelming tide, he was powerless to hold both flood tides in check. His hands kept clinching and twisting in unavailing impotence, and his throat was so dry and parched that he could not have uttered a word. His whole being was for the time a darkened void, where nought but a fearful apprehension and hot anger could penetrate his consciousness.
He walked beside his companion in silence, which was far worse than another man's rage.
"Why, John, I think I am more frightened of you than I was of the soldier," said Ellen at last. The silence had become too oppressive for her. "I can't imagine what ails you today. I thought you were the gentlest and quietest of men."
John stopped short in their walk, looked up a moment into the burning sky above him, stroked his beard with a slow motion, and with a little preparatory cough to clear away the dryness in his throat, he said in his drawling voice:
"Oh, don't be afraid; I would not injure even a soldier, if it were not wise or right to do so, my girl. I feel a little angry, that is all, that any one should seek to entangle our girls and draw them away from the safety and purity of their own innocent happy lives. That is all. Don't be afraid; I dare say both you and I are imagining a lot of things which will never happen. You will soon forget all about this handsome devil, while we will find Diantha down there quietly talking with Tom or Charlie Rose, or some other nice fellow, and she will be angry to see us come spying on her love affairs."
Yet, even as he spoke, his keen eyes detected away in the distant trees, where the brush had been cut away and the eyes could travel some distance in the green embrasure, a glint of a white dress, and he was sure that the coat beside the dress was a blue one, not the dark homespun he knew would be worn by his own people.
Both John and Ellen quieted every evidence of their approach, and Ellen fell behind her companion, with a dreadful shrinking fear at her heart, mixed even then with a bit of jealousy of her friend's apparent free understanding with her own cavalier.
"What are you doing here?" growled a low, husky voice behind the two, who were seated on a fallen tree, apparently absorbed in a book.
Diantha Winthrop looked up, startled, yet with full control of herself.