Half an hour passed. There was no sign of Lois. Then he saw her come, very slowly—walking, as it seemed to him, like one afraid of the ground upon which she trod. As she came nearer, he saw that her face was ghastly pale. Her eyes, which wandered restlessly to the right and to the left, were frightened, dilated. The thing had been a shock to her, of course.
He stepped a little way out from the shrubs, showing himself cautiously. She stopped short at the sight of him.
“Lois!” he called softly.
She looked at him, and a sudden wave of terror passed across her face. She made no movement towards him. He himself was wordless, struck dumb by her appearance. She gave a little cry. What the word was that she uttered, he could not tell. Then suddenly turning round, she fled away.
He watched her with fascinated eyes, watched her feet fly over the lawns, watched her, without a single backward glance, vanish at last through the small side door from which she had first issued. He wiped the moisture from his forehead, and a little sob broke from his throat. The vision of her face was still before him. He knew for a certainty what it was that had terrified her. She had started to keep her engagement, but she was afraid. She was afraid of him. Something that he had done had betrayed him. She knew! His liberty—perhaps his life—was in this girl’s hands!
He crept out of the shrubbery and staggered down the drive, making his way homeward across the hills as swiftly as his uncertain footsteps would take him. It was dusk now, and he met no one. Yet his heart beat at every sound—the clanking of a chain, attached to the fetlock of a wandering horse, the still, mournful cry of an owl which floated out from the plantation, the clatter of the small stones which his own feet dislodged as he feverishly climbed the rocks. Above him, on the other side of the road, towered the hill where he had sat and dreamed as a boy, where Rochester had come and encouraged him to prate of his ambitions.
He looked away from its dark outline with a little groan. Up on the hillside flashed the lights of Blackbird’s Nest. He stretched out his hands and groped onwards.