"I could not have kept still one moment longer,—no, not one instant."
She spoke loudly into the silence of the night. A low wind sobbed through some birches near her. It was only a low wind now; all violence had gone out of it.
When Carolyn looked back upon this night, she always recalled precisely how the wind sounded in the birches as she stood in the road, struggling for breath after her run. There was a damp perfume of rose-geranium clinging to her skirts, for she had trampled upon a shrub of geranium as she had once swerved from the path.
She tried not to listen, but she could not help straining forward to hear something, though she was fully aware that she had come away from the shore. She was also fully aware that by this time Lawrence and his companion could easily have returned; that is, if they had gone a few miles only, as was to be expected.
They had gone farther. What was Prudence saying to Rodney? What the tone of her voice? What the glance of her eyes in the dusk?
"What? What?"
Carolyn shouted out that word. She was almost beside herself, and, knowing this, she shrank back as she heard her own voice call thus into the darkness.
"I must be still,—still," she said, again. "If I give way, I cannot tell what I shall do."
A pause, during which she listened. Then she said, with a terrible vindictiveness:
"I hate her! hate her! hate her!"