THE YELLOW DOVE
She could not understand. He brought a command—a test of Cyril’s loyalty to Germany perhaps? Was that it? And if so, what? A test which meant victory or defeat—that was what Cyril’s last words had meant. Victory or defeat—life or death. It was a desperate game that he was playing. And what was he going to do tonight that made it necessary for him to leave her to ride to Kilmorack House alone?
Bewildered and weary with excitement and much thinking, she gave it up, and as in a daze set her mind to the task of finding the way to Horsham Hill. She rode on inland searching for the old sheep trail as Cyril had described it to her, but as the minutes went by and she did not find it she began to think that she must have passed it in the darkness. She had ridden at a walk for hours it seemed, keeping as she thought in a direction which would surely lead her to a road toward the Hill, but she realized now that she was lost on the moor and that it might be morning before she would find her way to Betty Heathcote’s. She stopped her horse and peered in every direction. Nothing but the undulations of the moor, hill and dale, a dead tree outlined against the sky, masses of rock uncouth in form, bushes which whispered in the wind, the babble of a tarn somewhere behind her, though she had not remembered passing it. There were no lights in any direction, none even from the heavens, for the stars had gone out. After a long while she wondered vaguely what time it was. She had no watch, but it seemed that a paleness like that which precedes the dawn had spread along the sky—though it hardly seemed possible it could be so late as that. Three—four o’clock she thought it might be—perhaps later. The one thing that now seemed to persist in her mind
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