'Pursuit?' she said. 'Who would pursue us?' 'Mr. Fishwick,' he suggested.
'Ah!' she answered bitterly; 'he might. If I had listened to him! If I
had--but it is over now.' 'I wish we could see a light,' Mr. Thomasson said, anxiously looking
into the darkness, 'or a house of any kind. I wonder where we are.' She
did not speak.
'I do not know--even what time it is,' he continued pettishly; and he
shivered. 'Take care!' She had stumbled and nearly fallen. 'Will you be
pleased to take my arm, and we shall be able to proceed more quickly. I
am afraid that your feet are wet.' Absorbed in her thoughts she did not answer.
'However the ground is rising,' he said. 'By-and-by it will be drier
under foot.' They were an odd couple to be trudging a strange road, in an unknown
country, at the dark hour of the night. The stars must have twinkled to
see them. Mr. Thomasson began to own the influence of solitude, and
longed to pat the hand she had passed through his arm--it was the sort
of caress that came natural to him; but for the time discretion withheld
him. He had another temptation: to refer to the past, to the old past at
the College, to the part he had taken at the inn, to make some sort of
apology; but again discretion intervened, and he went on in silence.
As he had said, the ground was rising; but the outlook was cheerless
enough, until the moon on a sudden emerged from a bank of cloud and
disclosed the landscape. Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry of relief. Fifty
paces before them the low wall on the right of the lane was broken by a
pillared gateway, whence the dark thread of an avenue trending across
the moonlit flat seemed to point the way to a house.
The tutor pushed the gate open. 'Diana favours you, child,' he said,
with a smirk which was lost on Julia. 'It was well she emerged when she
did, for now in a few minutes we shall be safe under a roof. 'Tis a
gentleman's house too, unless I mistake.' A more timid or a more suspicious woman might have refused to leave the
road, or to tempt the chances of the dark avenue, in his company. But
Julia, whose thoughts were bitterly employed, complied without thought
or hesitation, perhaps unconsciously. The gate swung to behind them, and
they plodded a hundred yards between the trees arm in arm; then one and
then a second light twinkled out in front. These as they approached were
found to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house.
The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks
of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last
sparse branches of the elms.