He took it in his brown, sinewy fingers, bent over it, and held it against his cheek. Then, quick as lightning, he had grasped it with a grip like steel, snatched her from where she stood, and almost before she could notice it, he was holding her in a crouching position down behind the bushes, one arm tightly about her waist, and his right hand over her mouth.
She was too much taken by surprise for the moment to struggle or attempt to cry out. Then, as her eyes were fixed upon him fiercely, she felt his hot breath upon her cheek, and his lips pressed upon her ear.
“Don’t move, don’t speak,” whispered the man, “he mustn’t see you along o’ me.”
Madge strained her sense of hearing, but all was perfectly still, and, concluding that it was a trick, she gathered herself together for a strong effort to get free, when there was a sharp crack as of a broken twig. Then the low brushing sound of dead strands of grass against a man’s leg; and, directly after Rolph came into view, plainly seen through the brambles, and as he came nearer Marjorie grew faint.
If he should see her—like that—clasped in this man’s arms!
Rolph came nearer and nearer, his way leading him so close to where his cousin crouched that it seemed impossible that he could go by without seeing her, held there by a man whom he would look upon as the scum of the earth. The agony of shame and mortification she suffered was intense, the greater because her presence here was due to the fact that she had vowed that, in spite of all, she would yet be Rolph’s wife, the mistress of The Warren.
As her cousin came on, and she felt Caleb’s arm tightening about her, a strange giddiness made her brain swim, and the objects about her grew misty; but clearly seen in advance of this mist was her cousin’s face, his eyes fixed upon the very spot where she was hiding, and plunging through the leaves to search her out, to drag her forth and upbraid her with being a disgrace to her sex, a woman utterly lost to all sense of shame. And all the time, throb, throb, throb, with heavy beat, she could feel Caleb Kent’s heart, and a twitching sensation in the muscle of his arm, as, influenced by the man’s thoughts of flight or violence, he loosened his grip, or held her more tightly still.
“He must see us,” thought Marjorie. “Oh, if I could only die!”
Close up now, and as he came nearer Rolph struck sharply with his stick at a loose strand which projected half across his path.
He must see them; he could not help seeing them, thought Marjorie; and then her heart stood still, and the mist began to close her in, for, to her horror, the culmination of her shame seemed to have arrived. Rolph stopped short, leaned over, apparently to part the brambles and gaze through them at the hiding pair, and then muttered something half aloud as he reached over more and more till his face was not six feet from his cousin’s, staring up at him with her eyes full of horror.