Some—no doubt many—there would be who might have no pity for the rash imprudence of a motherless girl yielding to the temptation given her and eloping thus; and her name, her story, and her transgression, in many a false version, might be bandied from lip to lip, a conviction that galled and fretted her naturally proud spirit; but the consciousness of all this was inferior to a sense of what she knew Mary would feel, on finding herself deceived thus and left alone—alone to face the scandal, gossip, esclandre, and reprehension to which her act would give rise; and the knowledge gave Ellinor acute mental agony.
She had been that morning at the churchyard, as if to bid her parents farewell in spirit, and saw the last chaplets that she and Mary had woven lying on their graves, all withered now, and she had marvelled when flowers from her hands would be laid there again.
All was still around her now; she could hear, however, the voice of Mary's tame owl in its nest in the garden wall, and the rush of the May over its rocky bed.
When might she hear that familiar sound in the sweet moonlight again? Ay, Ellinor, when?
Perfectly cool and audacious Sir Redmond Sleath was at the appointed place betimes, and though an intrigue or adventure of this kind was nothing new to him, his heart was certainly beating faster than usual under his well-cut coat as he quitted the hired brougham at the end of the lane which diverged from the highway towards Birkwoodbrae.
The moon, a sickly and slender one, was waning, and the chill, pale light of its crescent cast the shadows of the tall silver birches across the pathway as he picked his way forward to where the outline of the house at Birkwoodbrae came before him, with its grey walls and windows half covered by masses of monthly roses and Virginia creepers. The house and all around it seemed still as the grave. He had come betimes, we say, and was thus at his post a little before Ellinor came forth to meet him.
He heard no sound and saw no sign, and to him seconds seemed like minutes—minutes hours. Could anything have happened? Had Mary baffled the plans of Ellinor, or had the courage of the latter failed her at the last moment? He had known of such things; and there was a curious suppressed gleam—a latent glitter in his cold blue eyes that would not have been pleasant to see.
He heard the house clock strike the hour of nine, and just as the last stroke sounded he saw the waving of a dress and of a white skirt, the wearer of which turned into the lane, and he smiled as such men smile over the triumph of their own selfishness and heartlessness; but now Ellinor, for she it was, paused in her approach, for something between a yell and a hoarse oath escaped Sir Redmond, blended with fierce growling, and he felt as if his right leg had been caught in the sharpest of mantraps.
True to the instincts of hate and vengeance for more than one kick administered by Sleath, Jack, the bull terrier, who had been upon the prowl, had caught the baronet by the calf of the leg and held him fast!
Now, whether it was a dog, a cat, a hare, or a rabbit on which Jack fastened, he never relaxed his hold while life remained in his victim; and so, after tearing Sir Redmond's trousers from heel to waistband, Jack's sharp teeth were closed nigh to meeting in the muscles of his enemy's right leg.