‘At your convenience, sir: no hurry, sir!’ said the Runner, retreating to a discreet distance.
The sigh which escaped Miss Creed was one of such profound relief that it was plain her alarms had not until that moment been allayed. Sir Richard finished paying his shot, and with a brief: ‘Come, Pen!’ tossed over his shoulder, left the taproom.
‘He didn’t come to find me!’ breathed Pen.
‘Of course he didn’t.’
‘I couldn’t help being a little alarmed. What shall we do now, sir?’
‘Shake off your very undesirable travelling acquaintance,’ he replied briefly.
She gave a gurgle. ‘Yes, but how? I havesucha fear that he means to go with us to Bristol.’
‘But we are not going to Bristol. While he is being interrogated by that Runner, we, my child, are going to walk quietly out by the back door, and proceed by ways, which I trust will not prove as devious as the tapster’s description of them, to Colerne. There we shall endeavour to hire a vehicle to carry us to Queen Charlton.’
‘Oh, famous!’ cried Pen. ‘Let us go at once!’
Five minutes later they left the inn unobtrusively, by way of the yard, found themselves in a hayfield, and skirted it to a gate leading into a ragged spinney.
The village of Colerne was rather less than three miles distant, but long before they had reached it Sir Richard was tired of his portmanteau. ‘Pen Creed, you are a pestilent child!’ he told her.
‘Why, what have I done?’ she asked, with one of her wide, enquiring looks.
‘You have hailed me from my comfortable house –’
‘I didn’t! It was you whowouldcome!’
‘I was drunk.’
‘Well, that was not my fault,’ she pointed out.
‘Don’t interrupt me! You have made me travel for miles in a conveyance smelling strongly of dirt and onions –’
‘That was the fat woman’s husband,’ interpolated Pen. ‘I noticed it myself.’
‘No one could have failed to notice it. And I am not partial to onions. You drew a portrait of me which led everyone in the coach to regard me in the light of an oppressor of innocent youth –’
‘Not the thin, disagreeable man.Hewanted me to be oppressed.’
‘He was a person of great discrimination. Not content with that, you pitchforked me into what threatens to be a life-friendship with a pickpocket, to escape from whose advances I am obliged to tramp five miles, carrying a portmanteau which is much heavier than I had supposed possible. It only remains for me to become embroiled in an action for kidnapping, which I feel reasonably assured your aunt will bring against me.’
‘Yes, and now I come to think of it, I remember that you said you were going to be married,’ said Pen, quite unimpressed by these strictures. ‘Will she be very angry with you?’
‘I hope she will be so very angry that she will wish never to see my face again,’ said Sir Richard calmly. ‘In fact, brat, that reflection so far outweighs all other considerations that I forgive you the rest.’
‘I think you are a very odd sort of person,’ said Pen. ‘Why did you ask her to marry you, if you did not wish to?’
‘I didn’t. During the past two days that is the only folly I have not committed.’
‘Well, why did you mean to ask her, then?’
‘Youshould know.’
‘But you are a man! No one could make you do anything you did not choose to do!’
‘They came mighty near it. If you had not dropped out of the window into my arms, I have little doubt that I should at this moment be receiving the congratulations of my acquaintance.’
‘Well, I must say I do not think you are at all just to me, then, to call me a pestilent child! I saved you – though, indeed, I didn’t know it – from a horrid fate.’
