But she walked up to him boldly. She tried to laugh.
"Well! it is very unlucky and very disagreeable. But the station-master says there is a respectable inn. Will you go and see, while I wait? If it won't do—if it isn't a place I can go to—I'll rest here while you ask, and then I shall walk on over the sands to Marsland. It's eight miles—I can do it."
He exclaimed:
"No, you can't."—His voice had a note of which he was unconscious, a note that increased the girl's fear of him.—"Not unless you let me take you. And I suppose you'd sooner die than put up with another hour of me!—The sands are dangerous. You can ask them."
He nodded towards the men in the distance.
She put a force on herself, and smiled. "Why shouldn't you take me? But go and look at the inn first—please!—I'm very tired. Then come and report."
She settled herself on a seat, and drew a little white shawl about her.
From its folds her small face looked up softened and beseeching.
He lingered—his mind half doubt, half violence, He meant to force her to listen to him—either now, or in the morning. For all her scorn, she should know, before they parted, something of this misery that burnt in him. And he would say, too, all that it pleased him to say of that priest-ridden fool at Bannisdale.
She seemed so tiny, so fragile a thing as he looked down upon her. An ugly sense of power came to consciousness in him. Coupled with despair, indeed! For it was her very delicacy, her gentlewoman's grace—maddeningly plain to him through all the stains of the steel works—that made hope impossible, that thrust him down as her inferior forever.
"Promise you won't attempt anything by yourself—promise you'll sit here till I come back," he said in a tone that sounded like a threat.