But her light fearlessness mastered him. He let her go; he watched her figure on the steps, against the moonlight between the oaks overhead.
"Good-night!" she dropped again, already far away—far above him.
The young man felt a sob in his throat.
"My God! I shan't ever see her again," he said to himself in a sudden terror. "She is going to that house—to that man!"
For the first time a wild jealousy of Helbeck awoke in him. He rushed across the bridge, dropped on a stone half-way up the further bank, then strained his eyes across the river.
… Yes, there she passed, a swift moving whiteness, among the great trees that stood like watchmen along the high edge of the water. Below him flowed the stream, a gulf of darkness, rent here and there by sheets and jags of silver. And she, that pale wraith—across it—far away—was flitting from his ken.
All the fountains of the youth's nature surged up in one great outcry and confusion. He thought of his boyish loves and sensualities—of the girls who had provoked them—of some of the ugly facts connected with them. A great astonishment, a great sickening, came upon him. He felt the burden of the flesh, the struggle of the spirit. And through it all, the maddest and most covetous yearning!—welling up through schemes and hopes, that like the moonlit ripples on the Greet, dissolved as fast as they took shape.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Laura went quickly home. A new tenderness, a new remorse towards the "cub" was in the girl's mind. Ought she to have gone? Had she been kind? Oh! she would be his friend and good angel—without any nonsense, of course.
She hurried through the trees and along the dimly gleaming path. Suddenly she perceived in the distance the sparkle of a lantern.