Stair's lips tightened. He watched the treacly pour of the yellow fog thickening about him. His eyes noted mechanically the precise shade of darkness when it would be wise for them to set out for the High Stile, but his heart was sick with a sense of his own loneliness. He would be left to fight out a useless battle--with Patsy far off and eternally inaccessible. What after all would it matter if he took the king's shilling and went to the wars?
But his own observant eyes automatically reporting on the darkening landscape checked him.
"It is time for us to start!" he said quietly enough to Julian Wemyss, who rose to his feet and put away the letter of the Princess which he had been going over for the twentieth time.
Ghastly behind the High Stile, just as you cross over into Raincy property, rose the three tall trees of the Gibbet Ring. Once the Raincys had jurisdiction to hang men and drown women, and it was on this "moot-hill" that they dispensed their feudal laws as seemed to them good. There was something grim about the place even now, and as Julian approached, the High Stile stood up against the last flare of red in the evening sky not yet blotted out by the mist, gaunt and sinister as a guillotine.
And the dark silhouette of Adam Ferris, waiting for them, might well have been that of the executioner himself. Stair saluted Adam Ferris, who held out his hand frankly enough to his tenant's son.
"So, Stair," he said, "you have been missing for a long time from your father's table. I had the honour of dining with Diarmid Garland yesterday, and heard nothing of you. Ah, Julian! So this Captain of the Coast has been taking care of you."
He turned to his brother-in-law, who had come more slowly up out of the darkness of the glen, following Stair as closely as might be in the uncertain dusk, for the eyes of the ex-ambassador were not habituated to night duty like those of his guide.
Stair Garland drew back a little after he had seen that the two men were safe in the shelter of the great Raincy ash trees. He would let them talk the matter out. But his mind followed their argument, such as it would doubtless be. He knew the end--that Julian would persuade Adam Ferris to go to London to arrange the future of his daughter. Adam would not be so easy to persuade. Not only would he dislike returning all the way to London, but he would be far more doubtful than his kinsman as to the power he could exercise over Patsy's choice.