“I’ll show it to you if you like. There’s a pretty little place for people like you and me to have a chat in, up along over there.” He pointed through the hedge to a small copse of larches that grew green and thick at the corner of the hay-field.
She let him give her his hand and pull her out of the hollow. Quite passively, too, she followed him, as he sought the easiest spot through which he might help her to surmount the difficulties of the intervening hedge.
When he had at last decided upon the place, “Go first, please, Mr. Goring,” she murmured, “and then you can pull me up.”
He turned his back upon her and began laboriously ascending the bank, dragging himself forward by the aid of roots and ferns. It had been easy enough to slide down this declivity. It was much less easy to climb up. At length, however, stung by nettles and pricked by thorns, and with earth in his mouth, he swung himself round at the top, ready to help her to follow him.
A vigorous oath escaped his lips. She was already a third of the way across the field, running madly and desperately, towards the gate into the lane.
Mr. Goring shook his fist after her retreating figure. “All right, Missie,” he muttered aloud, “all right! If you had been kind to the poor farmer, he might have let you off. But now”—and he dug his stick viciously into the earth—“There’ll be no dilly-dallying or nonsense about this business. I’ll tell Romer I’m ready for this marriage-affair as soon as he likes. I’ll teach you—my pretty darling!”
That night the massive Leonian masonry of Nevilton House seemed especially heavy and antipathetic to the child of the Apennines, as it rose, somnolent and oppressive about her, in the hot midsummer air.
In their spacious rooms, looking out upon the east court with its dove-cotes and herbacious borders, the two girls were awake and together.
The wind had fallen, and the silence about the place was as oppressive to Lacrima’s mind as the shadow of some colossal raven’s wing.