The boy swelled again, and the colonel asked him, “Does Miss Dale know of your having played listener?”

“She!” said Crossjay.  “Oh, I couldn’t tell her.”

He breathed thick; then came a threat of tears.  “She wouldn’t do anything to hurt Miss Middleton.  I’m sure of that.  It wasn’t her fault.  She—­There goes Mr. Whitford!” Crossjay bounded away.

The colonel had no inclination to wait for his return.  He walked fast up the road, not perspicuously conscious that his motive was to be well in advance of Vernon Whitford:  to whom, after all, the knowledge imparted by Crossjay would be of small advantage.  That fellow would probably trot of to Willoughby to row him for breaking his word to Miss Middleton!  There are men, thought De Craye, who see nothing, feel nothing.

He crossed a stile into the wood above the lake, where, as he was in the humour to think himself signally lucky, espying her, he took it as a matter of course that the lady who taught his heart to leap should be posted by the Fates.  And he wondered little at her power, for rarely had the world seen such union of princess and sylph as in that lady’s figure.  She stood holding by a beech-branch, gazing down on the water.

She had not heard him.  When she looked she flushed at the spectacle of one of her thousand thoughts, but she was not startled; the colour overflowed a grave face.

“And ’tis not quite the first time that Willoughby has played this trick!” De Craye said to her, keenly smiling with a parted mouth.

Clara moved her lips to recall remarks introductory to so abrupt and strange a plunge.

He smiled in that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception:  for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises.  It was the sight of her which had animated him to strike his game; he was down on it.

Another instinct at work (they spring up in twenties oftener than in twos when the heart is the hunter) prompted him to directness and quickness, to carry her on the flood of the discovery.

She regained something of her mental self-possession as soon as she was on a level with a meaning she had not yet inspected; but she had to submit to his lead, distinctly perceiving where its drift divided to the forked currents of what might be in his mind and what was in hers.

“Miss Middleton, I bear a bit of a likeness to the messenger to the glorious despot—­my head is off if I speak not true!  Everything I have is on the die.  Did I guess wrong your wish?—­I read it in the dark, by the heart.  But here’s a certainty:  Willoughby sets you free.”

“You have come from him?” she could imagine nothing else, and she was unable to preserve a disguise; she trembled.

“From Miss Dale.”

“Ah!” Clara drooped.  “She told me that once.”

“’Tis the fact that tells it now.”