It had been flashed upon her mind that De Rothan was the friend who had told her father these things concerning Jasper Benham. Anthony Durrell saw so few people, and there appeared to be a curious intimacy between these two.
She stood and looked at herself in the glass as though she were questioning her own reflection.
Why were De Rothan and her father friends? Had De Rothan brought these vile tales to Stonehanger? If he was responsible for them, did that alter her impressions?
Yes, but she herself had seen Jasper with his cousin. That part of it seemed true.
And yet she distrusted De Rothan greatly.
[XVI]
Meanwhile Jasper Benham was at the end of his patience, and a creature of moods and savage bewilderment. Nance's strange hostility had not helped him toward decision. He was too much in love with the girl to seek to be revenged upon her because there was something that he could not understand. Even supposing that Anthony Durrell was a French spy, and that Nance knew it and wished to safeguard her father, what had she to fear from him; what reason had she for treating him with suspicion?
Well, what was to be done?
Jasper had spent two morose, vacillating days, and the moral quandary seemed all the deeper. What a scolding shrew was this thing called Duty! He was to denounce Durrell, was he—send red-coats to turn Stonehanger upside down, and lose, perhaps forever, his chance of Nance! No, Duty be cursed; he would do no such thing. If this clumsy meddling were the only means that Duty could suggest, he would throw Duty aside and stand by his own more magnanimous instincts.
Jasper was riding Devil Dick over Rush Heath farm when he came cheek-by-jowl with this decision. Restlessness had set him in the saddle, and it was still early in the afternoon when he found himself looking over a thorn hedge into a big turnip field that sloped southward toward the edge of a wood. A solitary, lean, brown figure showed up against the green of the young growth, a figure that moved its arms with the monotonous action of a man hoeing.