She felt instinctively through all the tumult of it that he could not look at her without a shudder, he who had always loved sun and color and richness about him—a soft skin and pleasant lips. Yet she was too near the veil, too close upon the eternal mystery, to cry out over a lost desire.
“Stephen, for God’s sake, go!”
She fell back on the pillow as he turned to the door and shook it, forgetting in the chaos of his thoughts that the woman Jael had turned the key. He beat upon the panels with his fist, and when the door opened for him, pushed past her without a word, and went heavily down the dark stairway to the hall where he had left his cloak and sword.
My Lord Gore was within twenty yards of his own house when a figure that had been loitering in the shadow came slantwise across the road to meet him, and stopped on the footway as he passed. My lord had a glimpse of a pair of shining eyes and the white oval of a man’s face between the drooping brim of a beaver and the upturned collar of a cloak.
“Good-night, my lord—fugax, fugax, solvendo non sumus.”
He was pushing on with nothing more than a low, soft whistle when Stephen Gore caught him by the arm.
“Blake!”
“Softly, for God’s sake, sir; I have loitered here for half an hour to give you the wink and the text.”
My lord still gripped his arm.
“What is it, man?”