“No,” she said, smiling. “When I found I could not go, I concluded I would get well here.”
“I suppose you are very angry with me for stopping you that night, though it was not I that did it.”
“If I were angry, I should not dare tell you, for fear of bringing down your vengeance on me.”
“But are you angry?” he asked anxiously.
“I told you I did not dare say,” she replied, smiling at him with an indomitable air.
“Please forgive me for it,” he said, not jestingly or lightly, but in deepest earnest, with a look almost of tears in his eyes. She wondered she had never before noticed what beautiful blue eyes they were. She rather liked the sensation of having him look at her so.
“Won't you stop me if I try to go again?” she demanded, with an audacious impulse. But she repented her boldness as the passion leaped back into his eyes, and hers fell before it.
“I can't say that,” he said. “God knows I will stop you so long as I have power, and when I can no longer stop you, the wheels of your carriage shall pass over my body. I will not let you go.”
It was strange that the desperate resolution and the inexorable set of his jaws, which, as he had made a similar declaration on the night of her recapture, had caused her heart to sink, now produced a sensation of rather pleasant excitement. Instead of blanching with fear or revolting in defiance, she replied, with a bewitching air of mock terror:
“Dear me, what a terrible fellow!” and, with a toss of the head, went on her way, leaving him puzzling his heavy masculine wits over the fact that she no longer seemed a particle afraid of him.