“Get up behind my servant. You shall serve your mistress yet.”
Betty gasped.
“Did you kiss my shoulder, Betty?”
No answer.
With a light laugh Tuke touched up his horse, and the deadly cold of the night met them full-face as they sped homewards.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
By all the chill miles homewards, whatever and what varying emotions prevailed in the breasts of the little party found no expression in words. Indeed there could be no passion of feeling in that bitter night so hot as to resist the numbing influence of a frost that seemed to glaze the roof of one’s mouth, if opened to speak, with ice. Tuke felt little but the instinct to prick his snorting beast onwards with bloodless heels. Yet through all he was conscious of a spark that glowed and wavered in him like a pulse—a little fierce flame of triumph and of ecstasy—a suffusion of audacity, or repudiation of the formal conduct to which he had vainly struggled to subscribe. He had no deliberate plan of evil in his soul; neither had he the courage or the inclination to face the situation of his own contriving. He had snapped under a strain, so it seemed to him; and that was all. For the moment it was exquisite pleasure to feel all his moral fibres relaxed as he drove intoxicated before the force he had for a time withstood.
“Your fingers are a love-knot about my heart, Betty,” he once said over his shoulder. “It should be a toasting fire for their comfort.”
He gently unslackened the clasp of the brown hands and bent and put one to his lips.
“They are cold as snow, sweetling,” said he. “The little bones of them are stiff as flower-stalks; and they are as pretty, Betty, and by and by the buds shall break on them, if you please. Would you like these poor cold little stalks to blossom into pearls and rubies?”