"Let me go!" she murmured hoarsely.
"No!"
"I will go to him!"
"You cannot!"
He spoke from between his teeth, as if in a fury of rage or fear, she could not tell which, but as she, poor soul, had never inspired terror in any one she quaked before his rage.
Just then she heard, as if in the room beyond, a few footsteps, then a call: "Come, Harry!" and after that the opening and shutting of a distant door. It was the Duke of Wessex going again, somewhere where perhaps she could not find him again, and here was this man standing between her and the object of her adoration.
With a vigorous jerk she freed herself from Don Miguel's grasp.
"Have a care, man, have a care," she said in a low, trembling voice, in which a suppressed passion seemed suddenly to vibrate. "Let me pass, or . . ."
"Silence, wench!" commanded Don Miguel. "Another word and I call the guard and have thee whipped as a disturber of the peace."
She started as if stung with the very lash with which he so callously threatened her. The fumes of wine and of excitement were being slowly expelled from her dull brain. A vague sense of bitter wrong crept into her heart; her own native shrewdness—the shrewdness of the country wench—made her dimly realize that she had been fooled: how and for what purpose she could not yet comprehend.