"Let me go, I tell you!" she cried, trying to escape. "Let me go!" She succeeded presently in wrenching her wrist out of his grasp. "You hurt me!" She clasped the wrist he had almost crushed. "I hate you! I don't want anything more to do with you!"
She left him standing there in the gloom. She hurried on; it was but a few steps to the door.
"Gusta!" he called. "Gusta! Wait!"
But she hurried on.
"Gusta! Wait a minute!"
She hesitated. There was something appealing in his voice.
"Oh, Gusta!" he repeated. "Won't you wait?"
She felt that he was coming after her. Then something, she knew not what, got into her, she felt ugly and hateful, and hardened her heart. She cast a glance back over her shoulder and had a glimpse of Peltzer's face, a pale, troubled blur in the darkness. She ran into the house, utterly miserable and sick at heart.
Gusta could not thereafter escape this misery; it was with her all the time, and her only respite was found in the joy that came to her at evening, when regularly, at the same hour, under the same tree, at the same dark spot in Congress Street, she met Dick Ward. And so it began between them.
XI