‘Alone at last! For a little while I can drop my mask,’ she said with the same weariness in her voice. ‘Is it not like the act of a crazy woman to come here to-day, among all these happy people?—I! Oh, the mockery of it! And yet to have stayed all day indoors under the same roof with him, not knowing from minute to minute what to expect, would have been worse than all. And then, Harold promised to meet me at this spot—the man whom I love—the man who loves me. Alas! alas! he can never more be “Harold” to me after to-day.’
She rose and went forward to the edge of the rock, and stood gazing at the waterfall with eyes that knew not what they were looking at.
‘What to do?—what to do?’ she sighed. ‘The same question that kept knocking at my heart all through the long, dreadful, sleepless night; and here, with the summer sunshine all about me, it seems no nearer an answer than it was then. Sometimes I think that what I saw and heard can have been no more than a hideous nightmare fancy of my own. But no—no! That voice—that face!’ She shuddered, and pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if to shut out some sight on which she could not bear to look.
Presently, she moved slowly back to the rustic seat and sat down.
‘Has he tracked me?’ she asked herself. ‘Does he know that I am here, or is his presence merely one of those strange coincidences such as one so often hears tell of? If I only knew! If he has tracked me, why did he not make it his business to see me last night or this morning? What if he does not know or suspect? I must not go back to the hotel. I must not give him a chance of seeing me. I must make some excuse and go away—somewhere—straight from here. But first I must wait and see Harold and—and bid him farewell. What shall I say to him? What can I say?’
Her heart-stricken questionings were broken by the sound of voices a little distance away. She turned her head quickly. ‘Clarice and a stranger!’ she exclaimed. ‘And coming this way!’ A spasm of dread shot through her. What if this stranger were another messenger of evil come in search of her?
And yet he looked harmless enough. He was a rather tall, thin, worn-looking man of sixty-five years or thereabouts. He was dressed in a high-collared swallow-tailed coat, pepper-and-salt trousers, and shoes. His carefully brushed hat, of a fashion of many years previously, had, like the rest of his attire, seen better days than it would ever see again. He had short white whiskers, and rather long white hair, which straggled over his coat collar behind. His thick, bushy brows were still streaked with black; and his eyes, which were very large and bright, seemed to require no assistance from spectacles or glasses of any kind.
‘Here is your sketch-book, dear,’ said Clarice as she came up. ‘This gentleman is Mr Etheridge, Sir William Ridsdale’s secretary,’ she added.—‘Mr Etheridge, my sister, Madame De Vigne.—Mr Etheridge has travelled all the way from Spa, bringing with him an important letter from Sir William addressed to his son. The hotel people sent him on here after us.’
‘But’—— began Mora, half rising from her seat.
‘I have already explained to Mr Etheridge that Mr Archie was summoned by telegraph yesterday to meet his father in London this morning. It seems very strange.’