"I suppose it is something about Wenham?" she asked.
The man shivered. He opened his lips and closed them again. The
woman's tone, if possible, grew colder.
"I hope you are not going to tell me that you have disobeyed my
orders," she said.
"No," he protested, "no! I was there yesterday. I came back by
the mail from Penzance. I had to motor thirty miles to catch
it."
"Something has happened, of course," she went on, "something
which you are afraid to tell 'me. Sit up like a man, my dear
father, and let me have the truth."
"Nothing fresh has happened at all," he assured her. "It is
simply that the memory of the day I spent at that place and that
the sight of him has got on my nerves till I can't sleep or think
of anything else."
"What rubbish!" she exclaimed.
"You have only seen the place in fine weather," he continued,
dropping his voice a little. "Elizabeth, you have no idea what
it is really like. Yesterday morning I got out of the train at
Bodmin and I motored through to the village of Clawes. After
that there were five miles to walk. There's no road, only a sort
of broken track, and for the whole of that five miles there isn't
even a farm building to be seen and I didn't meet a human soul.
There was a sort of pall of white-gray mists everywhere over the
moor, sometimes so dense that I couldn't see my way, and you
could stop and listen and there wasn't a thing to be heard, not
even a sheep bell."
She laughed softly.
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