There was nothing in his words or action that was precisely loverlike, nor did such likeness occur to her; but in the restraint he put upon the lover in him, his manner appeared to assume the confidence and ease of a perfect friendship, and she, scarce noting much how he spoke or acted, still felt that this advance of his gave her a new liberty to tell him that she scorned his friendship, for she had something of that sort seething in her mind concerning him.  As to his request just then, she merely said she would go on.

He was very urgent.  “Then I will not go,” he said, stopping again.  “You can’t go without me, and if my going involves your going, it is better not to go.”  He did not mean what he said, but he hoped to move her.

“You can go or stay as you think right,” she said.  “I am going to get Winifred, poor lamb.  I am not in the least afraid to go alone.  I have got a pistol in my belt.”

So he went with her.  They both walked fast.  The road was wide and muddy, and the night was very dark.

Trenholme noticed now for the first time that he walked in slippers; he would as soon have thought of turning back on this account as he would have thought of stopping if thorns and briars had beset his path.  He felt almost as if it were a dream that he was walking thus, serving the woman he loved; but even as he brooded on the dreamlike strangeness of it, his mind was doing its practical work.  If Winifred and Mrs. Martha were in the vehicle he had seen, what time they would gain while driving on the road they would be apt to lose by their feebleness on the mountain path, which he and Sophia could ascend so much more lightly.  Wherever their goal, and whatever their purpose, he was sanguine that he would find and stop them before they joined the main party.  He communicated the grounds of this hope to his companion.  His heart was sore for his lady’s tears.  He had never before seen her weep.  They had passed the cemetery, and went forward now into the lonelier part of the road.  Then Trenholme thought of the warning Harkness had given him about the drunkard’s violence.  The recollection made him hasten on, forgetting that his speed was almost too great for a woman.

In the stir of events we seldom realise to the full the facts with which we are dealing, certainly never perceive at first their full import.  Trenholme, however, after some minutes of tramping and thinking, felt that he had reason for righteous indignation, and became wroth.  He gave vent to strictures upon superficiality of character, modern love of excitement, and that silly egotism that, causing people to throw off rightful authority, leaves them an easy prey to false teachers.  He was not angry with Winifred—­he excepted her; but against those who were leading her astray his words were harsh, and they would have flowed more freely had he not found language inadequate to express his growing perception of their folly.