THE YELLOW DOVE
That was dead and Cyril buried with it. England? She put her head forward into her hands and pressed her fingers to her temples. England!
As the afternoon faded into night the conviction grew in Doris’s mind that the situation made personal considerations unimportant. After dinner she excused herself and, dressing warmly, toward twelve o’clock went downstairs past the library door and out to the stables. She found a sleepy groom and, giving him a liberal fee as the price of his silence, had a side-saddle put on a good horse and made her way in the direction of Ben-a-Chielt. She knew the road well, for she had traveled it many times with Cyril and Betty during the previous summer when all the world was gay and she and Cyril were lovers. She was a little nervous at being alone on the moor in the darkness, but not frightened. She gave herself greater hardihood by trying to remember that Cyril and Rizzio were gentlemen, one of whom she had thought she could have trusted with her life, the other a friend who wanted to be trusted with it—and now protested he held her honor dearer than his own. Not her enemies surely; and the thought of physical harm from either of them, the only thing that could have deterred her from this midnight venture, did not occur to her. But as she came to Saltham Rocks, the scene of Cyril’s last night’s encounter, she pressed forward more rapidly with a keen eye upon the gray blur of the road. She reached the cross-roads, her breath coming a little more rapidly, pulled her horse down to a walk and turned in upon Cyril’s property, going forward more slowly. Until the present moment she had formulated no plan of action, nor had counted upon the possibilities of discovery, so she rode cautiously, making a long de-
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