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III

THE PICNIC IN THE GLEN

“I think we will go for a picnic, Romeo,” said Priscilla.

It was a Saturday afternoon, warm and slumbrous, and Saturday was the day on which Raffold Abbey was open to the public when the family were away. Priscilla’s presence was, as it were, unofficial, but though she was quite content to have it so, she was determined to escape from sight and hearing of the hot and dusty crowd that thronged the place on a fine day from three o’clock till six.

Half a mile or more from the Abbey, a brown stream ran gurgling through a miniature glen, to join the river below the park gates. This stream had been Priscilla’s great delight for longer than she could remember. As children, she and her brother Mortimer had spent hours upon its mossy banks, and since those days she had dreamed many dreams, aye, and shed many tears, within sound of its rushing waters. She loved the place. It was her haven of solitude. No one ever disturbed her there.

The walk across the park made them both hot, and it was a relief to sit down on her favourite tree-root above the stream and yield herself to the luxury of summer idleness. A robin was chirping far overhead, and from the grass at her feet there came the whir of a grasshopper. Otherwise, save for the music of the stream, all was still. An exquisite, filmy drowsiness crept over her, and she slept.

A deep growl from her bodyguard roused her nearly an hour later, and she awoke with a start.

Romeo was sitting very upright, watching something on the farther side of the stream. He growled again as Priscilla sat up.

She looked across in the same direction, and laid a hasty hand upon his collar.

What she saw surprised her considerably. A man was lying face downwards on the brink of the stream, fishing about in the water, with one arm bared to the shoulder. He must have heard Romeo’s warning growl, but he paid not the slightest attention to it. Priscilla watched him with keen interest. She could not see his face.

Suddenly he clutched at something in the clear water, and immediately straightened himself, withdrawing his arm. Then, quite calmly, he looked across at her, and spoke in a peculiar, soft drawl like a woman’s.

“You’ll forgive me for disturbing you, I know,” he said, “when I tell you that all my worldly goods were at the bottom of this ditch.”

He displayed his recovered property as if to verify his words–a brown leather pocketbook with a silver clasp. Priscilla gazed from it to its owner in startled silence. Her heart was beating almost to suffocation. She knew this man.

The water babbled on between them, singing a little tinkling song all its own. But the girl neither saw nor heard aught of her surroundings. She was back in the heat and whirl of a crowded New York thoroughfare, back in the fierce grip of this man’s arms, hearing his quiet voice above her head, bidding her not to be frightened.

Gradually the vision passed. The wild tumult at her heart died down. She became aware that he was waiting for her to speak, and she did so as one in a dream.

“I am glad you got it back,” she said.

His brown, clean-shaven face smiled at her, but there was no hint of recognition in his eyes. He had totally forgotten her, of course, as she had always told herself he would. Did not men always forget? And yet–and yet–was he not still her hero–the man for whose sake all other men were less than naught to her?

Again Romeo growled deeply, and she tightened her hold upon him. The stranger, however, appeared quite unimpressed. He stood up and contemplated the stream that divided them with a measuring eye.

“Have I your permission to come across?” he asked her finally, in his soft Southern drawl.