Soon he saw her coming down the path, the gnarled and rugged trunks and spreading boughs building a sun-splashed colonnade towards the pool. Jeffray went down through the tall grass and met the girl at the edge of the wood.
They did not touch each other’s hands, but stood quite close together, smiling shyly like a pair of children. Neither seemed to have a single word to say for the moment. It was all silent intuition with them, a glance, a sense of nearness, a rush of blood to the face. They turned and walked towards the great stone by the pool. Bess sat down there. Richard found himself beside her, a foot of the bare rock between them.
“You look quite brown and strong,” she said.
“Yes, I am strong again,” he answered her.
“The two past evenings. I had a feeling that I should find you to-night.”
“Dan went out into the woods, and so—I came.”
They sat in silence a moment, looking at each other, and hearing no sound save the occasional plash of a fish leaping in the pool. Bess’s fingers were feeling for the brooch at her bosom. She unpinned it, and, holding it in her palm, held it out to Jeffray with a smile.
Their fingers touched and lingered an instant in the contact.
“At the tall lady’s throat who was near me when I was a little child.”
Jeffray, who was staring at the thing, glanced up suddenly into Bess’s face. A look of mute inquiry, of significant sympathy, flashed between them.
“How did the brooch come to Dan?” asked the man.
“Dan went out one night, and gave me this in the morning. Where it came from I cannot tell, unless Isaac, his father, gave it him.”
Jeffray sat in thought, balancing the brooch in his palm, and gazing out over the still waters of the pool. Bess watched him, her hands resting on the stone, her brown forearms bare to the elbow.
She swayed slightly towards him, her eyes on his.
“Can you discover how Dan came by the brooch?”
She frowned, and her mouth hardened; it was not in her heart to seek anything from Dan.
“I will not ask anything from him,” she said.
“Because I hate him, hate him night and day.”
“Yet you may learn something of your past from him,” he said.
“You may be no Grimshaw, Bess; you look to have finer blood in you than theirs.”
Bess lifted her head as though some ennoblement would be very sweet to one who felt the shame of her present lot. Any such discovery would lift her nearer to Jeffray and lessen that gulf between them that was ever stretched before her pride.