But what must not it have cost that timid thing to venture here with her warning!

It gave me a double sense of the reality of my boy’s, peril, that she had been excited to it, and she would not hear of coming in to rest; and when I entreated her to wait till I could get the gig to drive her part of the way, she held me fast, and insisted, with all the terror of womanly shamefacedness, that, “he—­that Tor—­that Mr. Torwood—­should not know.”  And she sprang up to go home instantly, before he could guess.

“Oh, Emily, that is too bad, when nothing would make him so glad.”

“Oh! no, no! he has been used too ill; he can’t care for me now, and as if I should—­”

I don’t think poor Emily uttered anything half so coherent as this, at any rate I understood that she disclaimed the least possibility of his affection continuing, and felt it an outrage on herself to be where she could even suppose herself to have voluntarily put herself in his way.

I thought there was nothing for it but to let her start, hurry after her with some vehicle, and then call and bring home my boy; but in the midst of my perplexity and her struggle with her tears, who should appear on the scene but Fulk himself, driving home the spring cart wherein, everybody being busy, he had conveyed a pig to a new home.

I don’t know how it was all done or said.  My first notion was that he should be warned of our dear boy’s danger, and rescue him before anything else.  I could not get into my head that there was no present reason for dread, and yet when I had gasped out “Oh, Fulk—­ Alured—­Fetch him home!  Emily came to warn us!” the accusation began to seem so monstrous and horrible that I could not go on with it before Emily.  She too, perhaps, found it harder to utter to a man than to a woman, and between the strangeness of speaking to one another again, and her shyness and his wonder and delight, it seemed to me unreasonable that poor little Alured’s danger was counting for nothing between them, and I turned from the former reticence to the bereaved tigress style, and burst out, “And are we to stand talking here while our boy is in these people’s power?”

Then Fulk did listen to what it was all about; but even then it seemed to me he would not think half so much of the peril as of what Emily had done.  In truth, I believe all they both wanted was to get out of my way; but they pacified me by Fulk’s undertaking, if Emily did not object to the cart, to drive her across the park where no one would meet her, and she could get out only a mile from home, and to call at Spinney Lawn in returning by the road and take up Alured.

What a drive that must have been!  Fulk had the advantage over Emily in knowing what poor Mr. Dayman had told him, whereas she, poor child, only knew that he had been so vilely served that she thought his affection and esteem had been entirely killed.

They had it all out in that tax cart, a vehicle Fulk now regards as a heavenly chariot, and I heard it all afterwards.