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He picked up his gun, listened anxiously for sound of him, and then crept cautiously out, with a quick glance along each slope. Nothing! nothing but the cheerful sun and the cloudless sky, and the empty blue plain of the sea, and the birds circling and diving and squabbling as usual and Nance's little parcel lying where she had dropped it. He had had other things to think about last night.
"The weakness is physical," he sighed, and had nearly fallen. Nance led him from the spot, and he was no sooner back in the tower-stair, than he fell heavily against the wall and put his arm across his eyes. A cup of brandy had to be brought him before he could descend to breakfast; and the perfection of Nance's dream was for the first time troubled.
"Then you do not consider it altogether the child's fault?" "No, sir, I can't say as I do. She jes' gits the signals mixed sometimes, that's all." The judge smiled. "So you think if she understood the signals, she'd follow them?" Uncle Jed's face became very earnest as he laid his hand on Nance's head.
As they turned the corner at Vauroque, they came suddenly on a number of men lounging on the low wall, and among them Tom Hamon, pipe in mouth and hands in pockets. As they passed he made some jocular remark in the patois which provoked a guffaw from the rest, and reddened Nance's face, and caused Bernel to glance up at Gard and jerk round angrily towards Tom.
Gard's eyes, straining into the dimness of the coming dawn through what seemed to him a most terrible long time, so packed was it with anxious fears, caught at last the white flicker of Nance's signal, and he dropped down just where he stood, among the rough stones of the ridge, with a grateful sigh. The strain was telling on him. He felt physically weak and worn.
And even if she had told everything that had happened that afternoon, what harm would it have done, or who could have found fault with it? Nothing could have been prettier or nicer than Nance's story, and Rosamond felt sure that she was a good old woman. She had been so afraid of their doing anything that Mr. and Mrs.
Their common experience at Forest Home had given them certain standards of speech and manner that lifted them just enough above their kind to be scornful. But to sit against the wall watching other people dance was nothing short of agony to one of Nance's temperament. "Come on and have a try with me, Birdie," she implored. "I'll pay the dime."
For Peter considered he had been supplanted in Nance's regards, though Nance had never regarded him as anything but a nuisance and a boor. And Julie considered herself scorned and slighted, though Gard had never considered her save as Tom Hamon's wife. It was they who had stirred up the Sark men against Gard, and they missed no opportunity of keeping their ill brew on the boil.
Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine.
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