When he had stood there a few seconds, with his back turned, he heard her voice, somewhat shaken, though with the accent of recovered self-possession, saying, in a tone of summons,
“Lord Hurdly—”
An inward revolt sprung up at being so addressed by her. The name had only sinister associations for him in any case, but to hear it from Bettina’s lips filled him with a sort of rage.
“Lord Hurdly,” she said again, and this time her voice had gained in steadiness, until it sounded mechanical and hard.
“I wish to express to you,” she said, when he had drawn a little nearer, “my thanks for your kind intentions concerning me. I can only repeat, however, that my decision is quite fixed, and that I shall carry out the plans I have made known to you. Do not urge me further. Do not write to me. It will be useless. Let me go back to the life from which you never should have taken me. You were mistaken in me from the first, and I have been nothing but a trouble and a hinderance to you. I am sorry. I ask you to forget it all if you can. But, above all things, I ask, if you would really help me and serve me in the one way in which I can be helped by you, that you will consider that the present moment closes our intercourse in every way, and will show me the respect, little as I deserve it, of proving to me that in this one instance, at least, you believe me capable of acting with rectitude and dignity, and of meaning what I say.”
He did not answer her. He only stood profoundly still and looked at her. That gaze, the searching, scrutinizing power of it, made her afraid. Trembling with terror of what she might reveal in answer to it, she turned suddenly and vanished through a door behind her, leaving him standing there, and with a consciousness that his keen eyes were on her yet, reading what she so ardently desired to conceal.
Once in her own room, she locked the door, and then ran swiftly to the window, which gave her a view of the terrace below.
There she saw waiting a hired trap, with its driver drowsing in the sunlight. As she looked, she saw the man from whom she had just parted come rather slowly down the steps and get into the shabby conveyance. His hat-brim hid the upper part of his face, but she saw the stern set of his jaw, the bronzed pallor of his cheeks.
She watched the little trap until it had disappeared behind some great oaks, which were one of the glories of Kingdon Hall. In a strange way she had come to love this stately old place, and it gave her a pang to feel that she was about to look her last on it. This feeling, however, was subordinated to another, which literally tore her heart; this was that, by the use of every means of thought and action within her power, she had quite determined never to run the risk of seeing this man again.
She knew that her only safety lay in flight, and she set to work at once to make her preparations to fly.