“Do you not know me, cousin?”
She sighed, seemed to sway a little, then to stiffen.
“O!” she said. “I know you now, indeed.”
He laughed, relieved.
“Why, what misled you, Kate?”
“Never mind.” She was a serpent all at once, subtle, wooing, alluring. “Let us go back this way. There is something I want to show you. Will you come?”
Come? He would have followed her to the pit. Yet what surprise had she in store for him, what unknown witness to her own mistake, what solution of this mystery of her denial about the music? She had appeared strangely affected by that performance; was it possible it had wrought upon her to forgetfulness? Well, he would know in a moment.
She meant that he should—meant to face him with the proof of his own misconception and his intended betrayal of herself. It was somehow that woman wretch’s doing, of that she felt certain, though she was bewildered with the complication of it all. But at least her course here was clear: it was to expose and denounce the would-be seducer in the presence of the wanton who had entrapped him.
Mrs. Moll, however, was not to be caught so easily. She had, in fact, having followed stealthily in Kate’s footsteps, and whisked behind a tree at the psychologic moment, overheard the gist of this colloquy, and it imbued her with no desire to return and face the music. She just waited until the couple had passed out of sight, then slipped into the track with a view to making her escape by it.
But, alas for “the best-laid plans of mice”—and monkeys! This little monkey was nabbed before she had well set foot on the path. For there suddenly appeared advancing towards her along the narrow way the figures of a couple of gentlemen—and each had a green scarf adorning his hat.