He turned suddenly and quitted the apartment, and then the house, with a half-formed resolution of fleeing to the wild woods, and never more returning.
Mittie, who was fortunately in her room above, (fortunately, we say, for her presence would have been as fuel to flame,) heard the quick opening and shutting of doors, and the sound of rapid steps on the flag-stones of the yard.
“Louis, Louis,” she cried, opening the window and recognizing his figure in the star-lit night, “whither are you going?”
“To perdition!” was the passionate reply.
“Oh, Louis, speak and tell me truly, is Clinton come?”
“He is.”
“And you are going to bring him here?”
“No, never, never! Now shut the window. You have heard enough.”
Yes, she had heard enough! The sash fell from her hand, and a pane of glass, shivered by the fall, flew partly in shining particles against her dress, and partly lay scattered on the snowy ground. A fragment rebounded, and glanced upon her forehead, making the blood-drops trickle down her cheek. Wiping them off with her handkerchief, she gazed on the crimson stain, and remembering her bleeding fingers when they parted, and Miss Thusa’s legend of the Maiden’s Bleeding Heart, she involuntarily put her hand to her own to feel if it were not bleeding, too. All the strong and passionate love which had been smouldering there, beneath the ashes of sullen pride, struggling for vent, heaved the bosom where it was concealed. And with this love there blazed a fiercer flame, indignation against her father for the prohibition that raised a barrier between herself and Bryant Clinton. One moment she resolved to rush down stairs and give utterance to the vehement anger that threatened to suffocate her by repression; the next, the image of a stern, rebuking father, inflexible in his will, checked her rash design. Had she been in his presence and heard the interdiction repeated, her resentful feelings would have burst forth; but, daring as she was, there was some restraining influence over her passions.
Then she reflected that parental prohibitions were as the gossamer web before the strength of real love,—that though Clinton was forbidden to meet her in her father’s house, the world was wide enough to furnish a trysting-place elsewhere. Let him but breathe the word, she was ready to fly with him from zone to zone, believing that even the frozen regions of Lapland would be converted into a blooming Paradise by the magic of his love. But what if he loved her no more, as Helen had asserted? What if Helen had indeed supplanted her?