He replied, “Maid Marian thought so.”
“Perhaps she had an attachment there,” said I. “I miss the application to myself.”
He laughed softly.
“Whether we fly from fear, or fly to love, we fly,” he said. “You may hold your enemies too cheap, not knowing that my lord makes interest with his sister, and for his own purposes, to subsidise your Dr. Peel. For the sake of the secrets of the prison-house, he will not leave her solus to the hue and cry. You have planted two dragon-heads in place of the one you severed.”
I shrunk before him.
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“By the token,” he said, “that he destined me to your fate, and I answered with the better part of valour, which you will be wise to imitate.”
“To-morrow,” I muttered; “we had already decided.”
“That is not all, nor enough,” he urged. “You may be Una, with a rhinoceros, and that is not enough. My lord rides a thunder-bolt. It is not enough to flee him; you must vanish—be no more.”
Now all of a sudden—I know not how—his words seemed to wake me to the fond illusion of my state. How, indeed, was I situated, with a legless Caliban to show me how to run? I had been blinded, by Gogo’s devotion, to the real nature of the presumption it had thought to justify. What honest right had he to have undertaken so responsible a deed, save he had provided for it to the last details? I felt suddenly very naked and forlorn—shiftless and crying, like some poor exposed child in the night. I clasped my fingers to the shadow, entreating it in a broken voice—