"Is it good-by, Lucetta?" he pleaded, with a fine, manly ignoring of our presence that roused my admiration.
She did not answer. Her look was enough. William, seeing it, turned furious at once, and, bounding by me, faced the young man with an oath.
"You're a fool to take no from a silly chit like that," he vociferated. "If I loved a girl as you say you love Lucetta, I'd have her if I had to carry her away by force. She'd stop screaming before she was well out of the lane. I know women. While you listen to them they'll talk and talk; but once let a man take matters into his own hands and—" A snap of his fingers finished the sentence. I thought the fellow brutal, but scarcely so stupid as I had heretofore considered him.
His words, however, might just as well have been uttered into empty air. The young man he so violently addressed appeared hardly to have heard him, and as for Lucetta, she was so nearly insensible from misery that she had sufficient ado to keep herself from falling at her lover's feet.
"Lucetta, Lucetta, is it then good-by? You will not go with me?"
"I cannot. William, here, knows that I cannot. I must wait till——"
But here her brother seized her so violently by the wrist that she stopped from sheer pain, I fear. However that was, she turned pale as death under his clutch, and, when he tried to utter some hot, passionate words into her ear, shook her head, but did not speak, though her lover was gazing with a last, final appeal into her eyes. The delicate girl was bearing out my estimate of her.
Seeing her thus unresponsive, William flung her hand from him and turned upon me.
"It's your fault," he cried. "You would come in——"
But, at this, Lucetta, recovering her poise in a moment, cried out shrilly: