He stood up and buttoned his frock coat over his white waistcoat.
“I’ll not take your answer to-day,” he said, quite unmoved by her anger. “I had no intention of doing so.”
He strode to the door without another look at her, signalled his coachman, stepped into his closed carriage, shut the door hard behind him and rolled away, with a smooth whir of shining wheels.
V
“I’ll give her time to think before I see her again,” Jarvis decided, as his swift-stepping bays carried him along through the April rain. He dropped the window of his brougham and drew in deep satisfying breaths of the moist air. He was glad that she had not yielded supinely, as a weaker woman might have done. There was to his mind something heroic, splendid in her attitude as she defied him. For the first time in his life, Stephen Jarvis felt the stir of half-awakened passion; and the savage within his breast, never wholly eliminated or even tamed by an imperfect civilization, exulted at the thought of the imminent conflict of wills, the flight, the pursuit, the inevitable capture.
“I’ll give her time to think—to be afraid!” he repeated; “then——”
The blood hammered in his temples and involuntarily he clenched his strong hands, as if already crushing that weaker woman’s will and subduing it to his own.
But Barbara Preston was not thinking of the fact that Stephen Jarvis had asked her to be his wife. Being a woman, and, moreover, hard driven by cruel necessity, she might have been pardoned, if for a moment she had allowed her thoughts to linger upon the interview which had just ended. She might even have recalled with a certain speculative interest the luxurious interior of the carriage into which he had stepped and the smooth roll of the wheels which had borne him away, safe shut from the wind and the weather. So might she be lifted and sheltered from the bleak peltings of poverty, and life become a smooth progression instead of a painful pilgrimage. The girl sat quite still by the window looking out through misty panes into a mistier world, and only vaguely aware of dripping lilac sprays, ruddy with swelling buds, and of the flash of wet brown wings athwart the gray sky.