He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady——?”
“If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?”
Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost terrible.
She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender yours?”
“I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.”
Oh that, she let him see,—even though with his continued grasp he might hurt her,—had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a stride—like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other bank—that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner, my tenant.”
“But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on what terms?”
“Oh, any terms—choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to free her arm—gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to let her go: “You can write me about them.”
He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?”
She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. “Farewell!”