"I'll do my best," said Rube; and with a clumsy obeisance, turned back towards the moor, looking after John Garnet's figure as it disappeared amongst the giant stems of Horner Wood, with a puzzled expression on his quaint old face. This frank, well-spoken stranger was a riddle he could not read; "a slot," as he would have expressed it, that left him "at fault." The man might be a robber and an outlaw; but at any rate he rode to admiration, was cordial, open-handed, and a sportsman to the back-bone. CHAPTER XVII. "LISTEN AND LEARN IT." "And you never told me your life was in danger, never said that a careless word might ruin both of us at a blow. Dear heart, surely you might have trusted _me_." It was Nelly Carew's voice, and her brow was pressed to John Garnet's shoulder, while she spoke. The red-cheeked apples hanging overhead in her grandfather's orchard had ripened less quickly under a hot harvest sun, than the love that a few short days brought to maturity in the maiden's heart. She could not believe that a month ago she had never so much as heard of the man whose presence now seemed a condition of existence, like the very air she breathed. Could she be the same Nelly Carew, whose whole being was once engrossed in grandfather's posset and the incubations of the speckled hen. Or was it all a dream. If a dream, she only prayed she might never wake again. "Why should I have told you?" he asked. "It could but make you anxious and unhappy, dearest; we have surely enough of difficulty and vexation as it is. Besides," he added, in a higher tone, "how was I to know, Nelly, that you liked me well enough to care?" There came a very kind look in the blue eyes--"Didn't you guess?" she whispered, softly. "Didn't you think it very strange of me, that day, when I gave you the posy out of the hedge?" There is a pleasant fiction amongst lovers, that the tender passages to which they constantly refer, must have taken place in the remote past. Nelly spoke of _that_ day as if the time since elapsed was to be counted by years, instead of hours. "I thought you the dearest, and the best, and the loveliest girl on earth!" was the appropriate reply; "and now I could almost find it in my heart to wish we had never met. For _your_ sake, Nelly, not for mine--not for mine." They were the old conventional words which have probably been the prelude to every rupture of attachments since men grew weary and women false; yet it was impossible to look in John Garnet's face, or listen to the tone of his voice, and doubt that this was the outcry of an unselfish heart, so loving, that it longed for the happiness of another, rather than its own. Nelly's eyes filled with tears. "I care for you," she said--"I care for you; that's enough! If you were to go to prison, I should go with you. If you were to die, dear heart, I should die too."