If Susannah’s letter had produced no effect on Charles, it had given him the keen pleasure of knowing that Heber was made a fool of as well as himself. The whole look of the man as he came to meet him sent the warmth of satisfaction through Saunders, because it suggested to him that he was out of spirits with the world. As the distance lessened between them his own expression proclaimed the feeling; and back again to his mind came the vision of their last meeting and Heber’s smile. It was his turn to smile now. He stopped.
“Well, have ye found her yet?” he asked.
The shepherd made no pretence of misunderstanding him; his methods were too direct for that, and even the engrafted genteelness of Charles’s points of view could not blind him to a certain nobility in the coarsely clad, weather-beaten fellow, which struck him at that moment as an additional outrage on himself.
“I know where I won’t find her, and that’s wi’ you,” said Heber, at a venture.
Charles was sharp enough to see where a vulnerable point would lie, and the overmastering longing to wound Heber inspired his tongue.
“And that’s where you’re wrong,” said he. “I’ve got her safe enough, and I’ll keep her too—for a bit.”
The pupils of the shepherd’s eyes seemed to be contracting as Saunders watched his face with an ecstatic sense of the success of his own words.
“If I follow ye till midnight,” Heber said, at last, “I’ll see whether ye speak truth.”
He spoke with a slow, cold emphasis.