"Better not," answered Roger. "They don't always like strangers."

"I'm not afraid," she replied mutinously. "Do just open the gate, anyway--_please_!"

Trenby hesitated.

"Well--" He yielded unwillingly, but Nan's eyes were rather difficult to resist when they appealed. "Open the gate, then, Denman."

He stood close behind her when the gate was opened, watching the hounds narrowly, and now and again uttering an imperative, "Down, Victor! Get down, Marquis!" when one or other of the great beasts playfully leapt up against Nan's side, pawing at her in friendly fashion. Meanwhile Denman had quietly disappeared, and when he returned he carried a long-lashed hunting-crop in his hand.

Nan was smoothing first one tan head, then another, receiving eager caresses from rough, pink tongues in return, and insensibly she had moved step by step further into the yard to reach this or that hound as it caught her attention.

"Come back!" called Trenby hastily. "Don't go any further."

Perhaps the wind carried his voice away from her, or perhaps she was so preoccupied with the hounds that the meaning of his words hardly penetrated her mind. Whichever it may have been, with a low cry of, "Oh, you beauty!" she stepped quickly towards Vengeance, one of the best hounds in the pack, a fierce-looking beast with a handsome head and sullen month, who had been standing apart, showing no disposition to join the clamorous, s...o...b..ring throng at the gate.

His hackles rose at Nan's sudden movement towards him, and as she stretched out her hand to stroke him the sulky head lifted with a thunderous growl. As though at a given signal the whole pack seemed to gather round her.

Simultaneously Vengeance leaped, and Nan was only conscious of the ripping of her garments, the sudden pressure of hot bodies round her, and of a blurred sound of hounds baying, the vicious cracking of a whip, and the voices of men shouting.

She sank almost to her knees, instinctively shielding her head and throat with her arms, borne to the ground by the force of the great padded feet which had struck her. Open jaws, red like blood, and gleaming ivory fangs fenced her round. Instantaneously there flashed through her mind the recollection of something she had once been told--that if one hound turns on you, the whole pack will turn with him--like wolves.

This was death, then--death by those worrying, white-fanged mouths--the tearing of soft, warm flesh from her living limbs and afterwards the crushing of her bones between those powerful jaws.

She struck out, struggling gamely to her feet, and visioned Denman cursing and slashing at the hounds as he drove them off. But Vengeance, the untamed, heedless of the lash which scored his back a dozen times, caught at her ankle and she pitched head foremost into the stream of hot-breathed mouths and struggling bodies. She felt a huge weight fling itself upon her--Vengeance, springing again at his prey--and even as she waited for the agony of piercing fangs plunged into her flesh, Trenby's voice roared in her ears as he caught the big, powerful brute by its throat and by sheer, immense physical strength dragged the hound off her.

Meanwhile the second whip had rushed out from his cottage to render a.s.sistance and the whistling of the long-lashed hunting-crops drove through the air, gradually forcing the yelping hounds into submission.

In the midst of the shouting and commotion Nan felt herself lifted up by Roger as easily as though she were a baby, and at the same moment the whirling lash of one of the men's hunting-crops cut her across the throat and bosom. The red-hot agony of it was unbearable, and as Trenby bore her out of the yard he felt her body grow suddenly limp in his arms and, glancing down, saw that she had lost consciousness.

When Nan came to herself again it was to find she was lying on a hard little horse-hair sofa, and the first object upon which her eyes rested was a nightmare arrangement of wax flowers, carefully preserved from risk of damage by a gla.s.s shade.

She was feeling stiff and sore, and the strangeness of her surroundings bewildered her--the sofa upholstered in slippery American cloth and hard as a board to her aching limbs, the waxen atrocity beneath its gla.s.s shade standing on a rickety table at the foot of the couch, the smallness of the room in which she found herself.

"Where am I?" she asked in a weak voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

Someone--a woman--said quickly: "Ah, she's coming round!" and bustled, out of the room. Then came Roger's voice:

"You're all right, Nan--all right." And she felt his big hands close round her two slender ones rea.s.suringly. "Don't be frightened."

She raised her head to find Roger kneeling beside the sofa on which she lay.

"I'm not frightened," she said. "Only--what's happened? . . . Oh, I remember! I was in the yard with the hounds. Did one of them bite me?"

"Yes, Vengeance just caught your ankle. But we've bathed it thoroughly--luckily he's only torn the skin a bit--and now I'm going to bind it up for you. Mrs. Denman's just gone to fetch some stuff for me to bind it with. You'll be quite all right again to-morrow."

With some difficulty Nan raised herself to a sitting position and immediately caught sight of a bowl on the ground filled with an ominous-looking reddish-coloured liquid.

"Good gracious! Has my foot been bleeding like that?" she asked, going rather white.

"Bless you, no, my dear!" Mrs. Denman, a cheery-faced countrywoman, had bustled in again, with some long strips of linen to serve as a bandage. "Bless you, no! That's just a drop of Condy's fluid, that is, so's your foot shouldn't get any poison in it."

"That's right, Mrs. Denman," said Roger. "Give me that linen stuff now, and then get me some more hot water."

Nan watched him lift and skilfully bandage the slightly damaged foot.

He held it carefully, as though it were something very precious, but delicate as was his handling she could not help wincing once as the bandage accidentally brushed a rather badly scratched ankle. Trenby paused almost breathlessly. The hand in which he held the white, blue-veined foot shook a little.

"Did I hurt? I'm awfully sorry." His voice was gruff. "What he wanted to do was to crush the slim, bruised foot against his lips. The very touch of its satiny skin against his hand sent queer tremors through every nerve of his big frame.

"There!" he said at last, gently letting her foot rest once more on the sofa. "Is that comfortable?"

"Quite, thanks." Then, turning to the whip's wife as she re-entered the room carrying a jug of hot water, she went on, with that inborn instinct of hers to charm and give pleasure: "What a nice, sunny room you have here, Mrs. Denman. I'm afraid I'm making a dreadful mess of it. I'm so sorry."

"Don't mention it, miss. 'Tis only a drop of water to clear away, and it's G.o.d mercy you weren't killed, by they savage 'ounds."

Nan bestowed one of her delightful smiles upon the good woman, who, leaving the hot water in readiness; hurried out to tell her husband that if Miss Davenant was going to be mistress of the Hall, why, then, 'twould be a lucky day for everyone concerned, for a nicer, pleasanter-spoken young lady--and she just come round from a faint and all!--she never wished to meet.

Nan put her hand up to her throat.

"Something hurts here," she said in a troubled voice. "Did one of the hounds leap up at my neck?"

"No," replied Trenby, frowning as his eyes rested on the long red weal striping the white flesh disclosed by the Y-shaped neck of her frock.

"One of those dunder-headed fools cut you with his whip by mistake.

I'd like to shoot him--and Vengeance too!"

With a wonderfully gentle touch he laid a cloth wrung out in hot water across the angry-looking streak, and repeated the process until some of the swelling went down. At last he desisted, wiping dry the soft girlish throat as tenderly as a nurse might wipe the throat of a baby.

More than a little touched, Nan smiled at him.

"You're making a great fuss of me," she said. "After all, I'm not seriously hurt, you know."

"No," he replied briefly. "But you might have been killed. For a moment I thought you _were_ going to be killed in front of my eyes."

"I don't know that it would have mattered, very much if I had been,"

she responded indifferently.

"It would have mattered to me." His voice roughened again: "Nan--Nan--"

He broke off huskily and, casting a swift glance at his face, she realised that the tide which had been gradually rising throughout the foregoing weeks of close companionship had suddenly come to its full and that no puny effort of hers could now arrest and thrust it back.

Roger had risen to his feet. His face was rather white as he stood looking down at her, and the piercing eyes beneath the oddly sunburnt brows held a new light in them. They were no longer cold, but burned down upon her with the fierce ardour of pa.s.sion.

"What is it?" she whispered. The words seemed wrung from her against her will.

For a moment he made no answer, and in the pulsing silence which followed her low-breathed question Nan was aware of a swiftly gathering fear. She would have to make a decision within the next few moments--and she was not ready for it.

"Do you know"--Roger spoke very slowly--"Do you know what it would have meant to me if you had been killed just now?"

Nan shook her head.