She drew a deep breath and looked at him.
"I thought I should never get out again," she said dispassionately, as one stating a bald fact.
"Out of that wood. You were just in time. I thought I was caught. I should have been, if you hadn't come."
Then she grew conscious of his expression, and answered it--
"I don't wonder. It doesn't much matter----" Her voice flagged and strained.
"Of course you thought I was mad. I knew you would. I do myself, sometimes. Any one would. Even Clare. That's why I never told any one. But it never happened when I was awake before."
"I wonder if you would tell me exactly what happened?"
"I was frightened," she began irresolutely.
"I'm a match for the average tramp, I think. I'm head of the games."
"You'd tell him what you thought of him, I'm sure."
But already her smile had grown absent; she was relapsing into her abstraction.
They had crossed the field as they talked, and struck into the little gravelled path that led to the monster glass-houses on the other side of the hedge. A wide gate barred their progress. Roger manipulated the rusty chain in silence for a moment, then, as the gate yawned open, turned to her pleasantly----
"Won't you have a look round, as we've come so far? You're in my territory now, and I've a houseful of daffodils just bursting."
His calm matter-of-fact manner had its effect. Alwynne absorbed in her sick thoughts, found herself listening to his account of his houses and his experiments, as one listens subconsciously to the slur of a distant water-course. She did not take in the meaning of his words, but his even voice soothed her fretted nerves.
Roger was perfectly aware of her inattention. He was not brilliant, but he was equipped with experience and common-sense and kindness of heart; and above all he was observant. The Alwynne of his acquaintance, pretty, amusing, clever, had attracted him sufficiently, had even, as he admitted to himself as he went in search of her, been able to entice him from his Sunday comfort to wander quarrelling in wet fields. But the Alwynne he had come upon half-an-hour later was a revelation; at a glance every preconceived notion of her character was swept away.
His first idea was that she had been frightened by roughs, but her manner and expression speedily contradicted it. She was, he perceived, struggling, and not for the first time, with some overwhelming trouble of the mind. He had been appalled by the fear in her eyes. He remembered Jean's account. Elsbeth had been worried about her for a long time: ill-health and depression: she believed there had been some sort of a shock--a child had died suddenly at the school....