Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/427

 away like a phantom, while he stood watching till the last flutter of her dress disappeared through the gloom. Then he, too, turned unwillingly homeward, with a prayer for the woman he loved on his lips.

If Alice looked round, it was under the corner of her muffler, and she sped back to her gleaming saucepans, her white dishes, and the warm glow of her aunt's kitchen, with a step as light as her happy maiden heart.

But there were only two ways of re-entering the "Hamilton Arms"—up a gravel-walk that led straight to the front door across a washing green, separated from the high road by a thick close-cut hedge, or through the stable-yard and back entrance into the scullery. This last ingress was effectually closed for the present by the arrival of Captain Bold, rather more drunk than common, swearing strings of new and fashionable oaths, while he consigned his wicked bay mare to the charge of the admiring ostler. Alice heard his reckless treble screaming above the hoarse notes of the stableman before she turned the corner of the house, and shrank back to enter at the other door. But here, also, much to her dismay, she found her retreat cut off. Two gentlemen were pacing up and down the gravel path in earnest conversation. One of them, even in the dusk, she recognised as the inmate of their blue room, who had given her aunt the gold cross. The other was a younger, taller, and slimmer man than his companion. Both were dressed in dark plain garments, gesticulating much while they spoke, and seemed deeply engrossed with the subject under discussion. Foolish Alice might well have run past unnoticed, and taken shelter at once in the house, but the girl had some shy feeling as to her late tryst with her sweetheart, and shrank perhaps from the good-humoured banter of the elder man, whose quiet sarcastic smile she had already learned to dread. So she stopped short, and cowered down with a beating heart under shelter of the hedge, thinking to elude them as they turned in their walk, and glide by unobserved into the porch.

They talked with such vehemence, that had they been Englishmen she would have thought they were quarrelling. Their arms waved, their hands worked, their voices rose and fell. The elder man was the principal speaker, and