He closed the door and casements carefully, after walking round the garden to see that no one was lurking there. Anne Purcell’s face still looked white and scared. The horror of a betrayal haunted her as she went to the window-seat, where the moonlight was already glimmering upon the glass.
“Speak softly. I had better draw the curtains.”
He did so, leaning over my Lady Anne, and stooping to kiss her before he drew away. Restlessness seemed in his blood, for he kept walking to and fro as they talked, pausing sometimes as though to think.
“Does the woman Jael know anything of this?”
“She knows everything. It was she who saved your life by tampering with the charges.”
“She knew the girl had pistols?”
“Yes—by watching through the hole in the wainscoting. She saw where Barbara kept them, and found a key to fit the coffer. Jael seemed to have foreseen something, for to-night she found that the pistols were no longer there.”
My lord turned to the table where the steel barrels glistened in the candle-light. He picked them up and looked at them closely, a deep pucker of thought upon his forehead.
“Who would have thought that the girl had so much devil in her! I tell you, Nan, she must have been playing with us all these years, watching and waiting, and pretending to be asleep. And it was a narrow thing, by God! But for that woman of yours, I should be lying there, where—”
He did not complete the sentence, but broke off abruptly, for the conscious shock seemed to strike him more heavily now the intensity of the moment had passed. He looked white about the mouth, and his eyes had a hard, scared wrath in them that made them ugly.