"Let me go! Let me go!" she screamed. "You vile coward! A pest choke you! Let me go!"
"Digby!" a stern voice shouted above the uproar of the crowd.
It might have been Captain Norris that spoke, or it might have been George Brooke. Merrylips never knew. But she did know that the grasp was taken from her arm, and blindly she turned and ran from the spot.
CHAPTER XX
LADY SYBIL'S GODDAUGHTER
When Merrylips stopped running, she found herself in the darkest corner of the bare, stone-paved room that took up the ground-floor of the wash-house. At her feet was a heap of old sacks, and she burrowed in among them, and lay gasping for breath.
She was sure that Miles Digby would follow her. On that account she had not dared run to her own chamber. For she was afraid of Digby now—yes, and afraid of all the men in Monksfield that had been her friends.
As she lay in the darkness that deepened in the wash-house, she saw the faces of Lieutenant Crashaw and her own brother Munn, as they looked on indifferently, while they wasted the corn of the poor folk at Storringham. She saw the face of Lieutenant Digby, as he struck Dick Fowell down. Such deeds were a part of war, which she had thought was all brave riding and feats of honor and bloodless victory.
She pressed her face between her arms, and as she did so, felt against her cheek the blood that had stiffened on her sleeve. At the feel of it she cried aloud.
Oh, she was sick and frightened of it all! She was ashamed of the boy's dress that she wore, of Digby's oaths that had been on her tongue, of the draught that she had drunk at the buttery hatch, of the loud threats that she had spoken against the rebels. She was not the lad, Tibbott Venner, and she knew it now. She was Lady Sybil's little goddaughter. She wanted to be again where she could wear her own girlish dress, where she would hear only gentle voices, where such things as she had seen this day could never be done.