“I quite forgot, indeed. If I had only remembered!” he answered, with a conscience-stricken face.
She wheeled herself round, and turned into the shrubbery. Stephen followed.
“If you had told me to watch anything, Stephen, I should have religiously done it,” she capriciously went on, as soon as she heard him behind her.
“Forgetting is forgivable.”
“Well, you will find it, if you want me to respect you and be engaged to you when we have asked papa.” She considered a moment, and added more seriously, “I know now where I dropped it, Stephen. It was on the cliff. I remember a faint sensation of some change about me, but I was too absent to think of it then. And that’s where it is now, and you must go and look there.”
“I’ll go at once.”
And he strode away up the valley, under a broiling sun and amid the deathlike silence of early afternoon. He ascended, with giddy-paced haste, the windy range of rocks to where they had sat, felt and peered about the stones and crannies, but Elfride’s stray jewel was nowhere to be seen. Next Stephen slowly retraced his steps, and, pausing at a crossroad to reflect a while, he left the plateau and struck downwards across some fields, in the direction of Endelstow House.
He walked along the path by the river without the slightest hesitation as to its bearing, apparently quite familiar with every inch of the ground. As the shadows began to lengthen and the sunlight to mellow, he passed through two wicket-gates, and drew near the outskirts of Endelstow Park. The river now ran along under the park fence, previous to entering the grove itself, a little further on.
Here stood a cottage, between the fence and the stream, on a slightly elevated spot of ground, round which the river took a turn. The characteristic feature of this snug habitation was its one chimney in the gable end, its squareness of form disguised by a huge cloak of ivy, which had grown so luxuriantly and extended so far from its base, as to increase the apparent bulk of the chimney to the dimensions of a tower. Some little distance from the back of the house rose the park boundary, and over this were to be seen the sycamores of the grove, making slow inclinations to the just-awakening air.
Stephen crossed the little wood bridge in front, went up to the cottage door, and opened it without knock or signal of any kind.
Exclamations of welcome burst from some person or persons when the door was thrust ajar, followed by the scrape of chairs on a stone floor, as if pushed back by their occupiers in rising from a table. The door was closed again, and nothing could now be heard from within, save a lively chatter and the rattle of plates.
VIII
“Allen-a-Dale is no baron or lord.”
The mists were creeping out of pools and swamps for their pilgrimages of the night when Stephen came up to the front door of the vicarage. Elfride was standing on the step illuminated by a lemon-hued expanse of western sky.
“You never have been all this time looking for that earring?” she said anxiously.
“Oh no; and I have not found it.”
“Never mind. Though I am much vexed; they are my prettiest. But, Stephen, what ever have you been doing—where have you been? I have been so uneasy. I feared for you, knowing not an inch of the country. I thought, suppose he has fallen over the cliff! But now I am inclined to scold you for frightening me so.”
“I must speak to your father now,” he said rather abruptly; “I have so much to say to him—and to you, Elfride.”
“Will what you have to say endanger this nice time of ours, and is it that same shadowy secret you allude to so frequently, and will it make me unhappy?”
“Possibly.”
She breathed heavily, and looked around as if for a prompter.
“Put it off till tomorrow,” she said.
He involuntarily sighed too.
“No; it must come tonight. Where is your father, Elfride?”
“Somewhere in the kitchen garden, I think,” she replied. “That is his favourite evening retreat. I will leave you now. Say all that’s to be said—do all there is to be done. Think of me waiting anxiously for the end.” And she re-entered the house.
She waited in the drawing-room, watching the lights sink to shadows, the shadows sink to darkness, until her impatience to know what had occurred in the garden could no longer be controlled. She passed round the shrubbery, unlatched the garden door, and skimmed with her keen eyes the whole twilighted space that the four walls enclosed and sheltered: they were not there. She mounted a little ladder, which had been used for gathering fruit, and looked over the wall into the field. This field extended to the limits of the glebe, which was enclosed on that side by a privet-hedge. Under the hedge was Mr. Swancourt, walking up and down, and talking aloud—to himself, as it sounded at first. No: another voice shouted occasional replies; and this interlocutor seemed to be on the other side of the hedge. The voice, though soft in quality, was not Stephen’s.
The second speaker must have been in the long-neglected garden of an old manor-house hard by, which, together with a small estate attached, had lately been purchased by a person named Troyton, whom Elfride had never seen. Her father might have struck up an acquaintanceship with some member of that family through the privet-hedge, or a stranger to the neighbourhood might have wandered thither.
Well, there was no necessity for disturbing him. And it seemed that, after all, Stephen had not yet made his desired communication to her father. Again she went indoors, wondering where Stephen could be. For want of something better to do, she went upstairs to her own little room. Here she sat down at the open window, and, leaning with her elbow on the table and her cheek upon her hand, she fell
