Alice was no weakling and she put out all her strength and fought him, screaming.
“Oh, ye cat, ye!” he said harshly, shaking her again; “take that—an’ that, ye lyin’, desateful hizzy! I’ll teach ye,” and he shook her much as a big dog shakes a kitten.
Alice screamed; if she even dimly conceived his error, she had no breath to argue with him; she believed, indeed, that her last hour had come, and shrieked with all her strength. And Denis shook her, and would have gone on shaking her indefinitely but for a timely interruption.
CHAPTER XXIX
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
WHEN Lady Clancarty ascended the water stairs on her return from the Tower she was outwardly calm, the floodtide of her emotion having spent itself in the outburst at the Traitor’s Gate. Young Mackie, still acting as her sole escort, came up the steps behind her and the two, pausing at the top, saw dawn breaking over the river. Like a wraith the fog rolled up along the water, the sky grew pale and in the far east a light shone, keen and cold. The streets were unusually quiet; it was a little before the hour when a city stirs for its first breath; darkness lay deeply in the narrow lanes, and silence. On the river, which bristled with a forest of masts, some ships put up their sails.
Suddenly they heard a woman’s scream and saw two figures struggling at the mouth of the lane before them. Mackie started toward them, but the woman broke away and ran screaming to the water side, almost brushing against Lady Clancarty, and as she did so there was a cry of recognition and she fell upon her neck, weeping and exclaiming. It was Alice Lynn. Sir Edward seized the man.
“You rogue!” he exclaimed, “you would abuse a woman, would you?”