As he disappeared from view down one of the branching paths of the shrubbery, an odious little laugh, half chuckle, half snigger, came to the ears of the three listeners. Claire’s face set itself in lines that made her look years older than her age. “You’d better go,” she whispered unevenly. “We shan’t be able to talk any more now that he knows you are here. He’ll be hovering round--_somewhere_.” Jean nodded. “Yes, we’d better be going. Come along, Nick. And let us know, Claire”--dropping her voice--“as soon as you have found out for certain what day he goes away. You can telephone down to us, can’t you?” “Yes. I’ll ring up when he’s out of the house some time,” she answered “Or send a message. Anyway, I’ll manage to let you know somehow. Oh!”--stretching out her arms ecstatically--“imagine a day, of utter freedom! A whole day!” CHAPTER XX--THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE GOLD of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark. “Oh! How utterly perfect this is!” sighed Jean. She was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss. Tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes. There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!” “Do you remember----” he began involuntarily, then checked himself. “’M--m?” she queried. The little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy. The Jean of the last few days--the days immediately following their quarrel--had temporarily vanished. The beauty of the Moor had taken hold of her, and all the mockery and bitter-sweetness which she had latterly reserved for Tomarin’s benefit was absent from her manner. She was just her natural sweet and wholesome self. “’M--m? Do I remember--what?” “I was thinking what a pagan little beauty-lover you are! You worshipped the Alps. Now you are worshipping Dartmoor.” She nodded. “I don’t see why you should call it ‘pagan,’ though. I should say it was equally Christian. I think we were _meant_ to love beauty. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a lot of it about. God didn’t put it around just by accident.”