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Instead of delaying from the 1st to the 11th of February for "some regiment that was ice-bound near Columbus, Kentucky," it was an entire brigade, Colonel Waring's, without which your orders to me were peremptory not to move. I asked you if I should wait its arrival, and you answered: "Certainly; if you go without it, you will be, too weak, and I want you strong enough to go where you please."
And yet, without shutting his eyes, he could almost see the child, deadly pale, tired, delighted and wholly unexplained, bending forward with her wonderful white arms outstretched to catch poor Agnes Waring's horse-shoe paper-weight, laughing one moment, crying the next, kissing him the moment after. And how she seemed to be in love with him. . . .
Waring had slipped, and, unable to recover his footing, fallen on a heap of stones and received his injury. My first question to Josephine was, "Where is Mr. Waring's mother?" "He would not send for her, Sally," said she, "because she is not well, and he feared to startle her." "H'm!" said I, very curtly.
This was no idle boast of Waring's. Worthless as he was in so many respects, he was remarkably skilful with the axe, as he now proved by the rapid manner in which he severed the trunk of the large elm on which he was at work. He inquired of Ben where he should "lay the tree," and when it came clattering down, it fell on the precise spot indicated.
It did not go to press until about four a.m., and they could hold it beyond that hour if necessary. That part of it was all right if they could only get the police into action in time to catch the scoundrels who were plotting at Waring's house. If all went well she might expect to reach the wire by midnight. They would have her story in type in plenty of time if there was no wire trouble.
But to Colonel Kelmscott, reading in between the lines as he went, there was more in it than even that. He saw, though dimly, some hint of a motive. For it was at Mambury that all these things had taken place; and it was at Mambury that the secret of Guy Waring's descent lay buried, as he thought, in the parish registers.
So the hope of Mark Waring's life went down there without a cry or a struggle as it is fitting the hope of a strong heart should die into the depths of the great sea that never will give up its dead. The lover of the present day is rather a curious study immediately after he has encountered a defeat or disappointment. Sometimes the phase is a mild melancholy.
"Quick! quick!" he cried, in a voice of eager warning. "Run, run for your life to the mouth of the tunnel! Here, come! You've only just time! It's going, it's going!" But Elma's feminine instinct worked quicker and truer than even Cyril Waring's manly reason.
For the Kelmscotts, of Tilgate Park, were the oldest county family in all that part of Surrey; and Colonel Kelmscott himself passed as the proudest man of that haughtiest house in Southern England. What, therefore, could have made him give so curious and almost imperceptible a start the moment Guy Waring's name was mentioned in conversation?
She had read of Waring's fight in the desert and of his slow recovery, and that Waring was Lorry's father; matters that she could not speak of to Lorry, but the knowledge of them lent a kind of romance to her ranger man. At times she studied Lorry, endeavoring to find in him some trace of his father's qualities. She had not met Waring, but she imagined much from what she had heard and read.
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