"You get off," shouted Rupert. "The horse was lent to me, not to you. Do you hear, Cris?"
Cris heard, but did not stop: he was urging the horse on. "You don't want him," he roughly said. "You can walk, as you always do."
Further remonstrance, further following, was useless. Rupert's words were drowned in the echoes of the horse's hoofs, galloping away in the distance. Rupert stood, white with anger, impotent to stop him, his hands stretched out on the empty air, as if their action could arrest the horse and bring him back again. Certainly the mortification was bitter; the circumstance precisely one of those likely to affect an excitable nature; and Rupert was on the point of going into that dangerous fit known as the Trevlyn passion, when its course was turned aside by a hand laid upon his shoulder.
He turned, it may almost be said, savagely. Ford was standing there out of breath, his good-humoured face red with the exertion of running.
"I say, Mr. Rupert, you'll do a fellow a service, won't you? I have had a message that my mother's taken suddenly ill; a fit, they say, of some sort. Will you finish what there is to do here, and lock up for once, so that I can go home directly?"
Rupert nodded. In his passionate disappointment, at having to walk home when he expected to ride, at being treated as of no moment by Cris Chattaway, it seemed of little consequence to him how long he remained, or what work he had to do: and the clerk, waiting for no further permission, sped away with a fleet foot. Rupert's face was losing its deathly whiteness—there is no whiteness like that born of passion or of sudden terror; and when he sat down again to the desk, the hectic flush of reaction was shining in his cheeks and lips.
Well, oh, well for him, could these dangerous fits of passion have been always arrested on the threshold, as this had been arrested now! The word is used advisedly: they brought nothing less than danger in their train.
But, alas! this was not to be.