She shrank back as if I had struck her and the soft eyes flashed with anger.
“How dare you! How dare you ask me to meet you like this?”
I stopped ashamed. In an instant my sudden emotion was chilled. I felt myself a criminal facing my judge.
“Forgive me,” I stammered. “I was obliged to speak to you before you saw Sir Frank Tarleton. I had to explain to you who he was and what he was going to ask you.”
She interrupted me with a gesture of scorn. She pointed to the roof of the barn, just visible over the crest of the slope from where we stood.
“How dared you ask me to meet you there? Was there no other place?” Her voice shook. “How could you be so brutal? To remind me! To drag me back to the one spot on earth that I was trying to forget!”
The reproach pierced me like a knife. She was right. What was I but a brute? What else is any man in dealing with the mystery of a woman’s heart—with those delicate fibres which our rude touch so often bruises and rends unawares?
I could have thrown myself at her feet and begged her to trample the life out of me. But there would have been no reparation in that; there was none in anything that I could think of doing. It was a case of least said soonest mended. I had to leave the wound I had given her to heal itself, and meanwhile try to render her the only service that was in my power.
“You can say nothing to me that I don’t deserve, nothing that is severe enough,” I answered. “I can only plead that I was distracted by anxiety, on your account.”
The indignation in her face turned to terror.