It was much too dark, under the shade of the trees, at that moment, to see the face of Captain Hector Coles, or he might have been discovered, even under his moustache, biting his lip so sharply that the blood came. An eye keen enough to have seen this, too, would have been able to see that Horace Townsend trembled like an aspen leaf, that great beads of sweat started out on his brown forehead, while he muttered a fierce word of anger and indignation that died away on the night air without reaching any human ear. Captain Hector Coles choked an instant and then went on: "He entrusted her to the care of that adventurer, who managed, before they had ridden a mile, to lose his way and his presence of mind at the same time--got her and her pony on the top of a slippery rock where there were ten thousand chances to one that she would fall a thousand feet over the precipice--and then sat on his horse, white as a sheet and too badly scared to attempt rescuing her, yelling like a booby for help, until that coarse fellow from somewhere out West came up and grasped her just as she was going over." What would not Horace Townsend have given for a grip of the throat of Captain Hector Coles at that moment? And what would he not have given to hear Margaret Hayley say: "I do not believe the story! The man who leaped into the Pool the other day, is not the booby and poltroon you would make him, just because you are jealous of him, Captain Hector Coles!" What, we say, would the listener not have given to hear _that_? Alas!--he had no reason to expect any such word, and no such word was spoken. Margaret Hayley merely rose from her seat, saying: "Now, if you have finished that rigmarole, in which nobody, I think, is in the least interested, we will go to the house, for I am taking cold." The others rose, and the three moved towards the house. Horace Townsend did not move towards the house, but in another direction, his heart on fire and his brain in a whirl. But as they went off he heard the Captain say, apparently in response to some remark of Mrs. Burton Hayley's which was not caught at that distance: "Of course I believe him to be a coward as well as a disreputable character. Any man who would flinch from _any_ exposure, especially like that on a mere edge of a cliff, to save life, is the basest kind of a coward. Such men ought to stand a little while among bullets, as _we_ have to do, and they would soon show themselves for what they are worth."