With a low cry of sudden fear and alarm, Jaquelina sprang up and turned to flee.
But her enemy was too swift for her. At a single bound he cleared the brook, and before she had run a dozen rods he caught her arm in a grasp of steel.
She turned toward him with a white imploring face and frightened eyes.
"Let me go," she panted, with failing breath. "I cannot go with you, I cannot be your wife!"
He laughed scornfully.
"You shall go free," he said. "Do not be frightened—the time for my revenge is not yet. I shall only dash the cup of joy from your lips when it is so full that a rose-leaf will cause it to overflow. I am going now; but remember this truth, my fair enemy, I am not powerless. I am only biding my time. In the moment that is the happiest of your whole life I shall take my revenge!"
He threw her wrathfully from him, and in a moment had disappeared from sight and hearing. Jaquelina lay half-stunned a moment in the long, dewy grass where she had fallen, her heart thrilling with a dumb, prescient fear and dread.
"In the moment that is the happiest of your whole life I will take my revenge," Gerald Huntington had said, and those words had strangely recalled the words of her lover's letter.
"In the moment when you give yourself to me—the happiest moment of my life!" Ronald Valchester had written; and Jaquelina shivered with a nameless dread and terror, for she knew that that moment would be the happiest one of her whole life also.