It was the work of half a minute, and in the next Maurice felt as if he should die of shame and remorse.
"For God's sake, forgive me!" he cried, brokenly. "I am a brute—I forgot myself—I must be mad, I think; for Heaven's sake tell me that I have not offended you past forgiveness, Vera!"
His pulses were beating wildly, his face was flushed, the hands that still held hers shook with a nameless emotion; he looked imploringly into her face, as if to read his sentence in her eyes, but what he saw there arrested the torrent of repentance and regret that was upon his lips.
Upon Vera's face there was no flush either of shame or anger. No storm of indignation, no passion of insulted feeling; only eyes wide open and terror-stricken, that met his with the unspeakable horror that one sees sometimes in those of a hunted animal. She was pale as death. Then suddenly the colour flushed hotly back into her face; she averted her eyes.
"Let me go home," she said, in a faint voice; "help me to get on to my horse, Maurice."
There was neither resentment nor anger in her voice, only a great weariness.
He obeyed her in silence. Possibly he felt that he had stood for one instant upon the verge of a precipice, and that miraculously her face had saved him, he knew not how, where words would only have dragged him down to unutterable ruin.
What had it been that had thus saved him? What was the meaning of that terror that had been written in her lovely eyes? Since she was not angry, what had she feared?
Maurice asked himself these questions vainly all the way home. Not a word was spoken between them; they rode in absolute silence side by side until they reached the house.
Then, as he lifted her off her horse at the hall-door, he whispered,