“When you have done crying,” said Frederick, still savage, “perhaps you will explain to me what ridiculous cause brought you to this plight. Have you run away entirely? Where were you going? What do you want! You little fool! They are far kinder to you at home than any one would be anywhere else. You would gain very little, I can tell you, by running away.”
“I did not mean to run away,” said Innocent, crying softly as it were, under her breath.
“You will find no other people so foolish,” said Frederick savagely. “What did you want? what were you thinking of? Good heavens! you are a girl, are you, and not a spirit of mischief? Fancy my dismay when I saw you—you, who ought to have been safe and sound at home, questioned by a policeman in the midst of a London crowd! Try and imagine how disgraceful such a thing is to yourself—how exasperating to me.”
“Oh, Frederick!” cried the girl, overwhelmed by his reproaches, and roused into understanding by the sharpness of the pain to which she was subjected, “I did not mean it. Do not be angry: it was not my fault——”
“Not your fault!” he cried in his rage. “Good heavens! if it had not been that I was afraid you might get into some still more disgraceful scrape, I should have left you to your fate. The thought did go through my mind. If this were known, nobody would ever speak to you again; nobody would believe your excuses. Not your fault! What made you come out at all, away from home?”
“Oh, don’t be angry,” she cried piteously, and put out her trembling hand to touch his coat, to propitiate and pacify him with abject self-humiliation. By this time his passion had begun to wear itself out, but he would not give her any sign of forgiveness. When the cab reached the gate of the Elms, it was thrown open to them by all the servants in a body, who were searching about among the shrubbery with lights.
“Oh, here she is, with Mr. Frederick. I know’d she’d be found with Mr. Frederick,” said one of the maids, whom Frederick overheard.
Mrs. Eastwood met them at the door, looking pale and frightened. “Oh, thank God, here she is at last!” she cried to Nelly, who was behind.
Innocent clutched tightly at Frederick’s arm as she stepped down, bewildered and dazzled by the lights that flashed everywhere around her. He had scolded her cruelly, but yet she clung to him in preference to the women who had been so kind to her. He felt the implied compliment, even in the midst of his wrath.
“Yes, I have brought the little fool home,” he cried loudly, that all might hear him. “Where do you think I found her? In the middle of the Brompton Road, with a crowd round, crying, and unable to tell where she came from. What were you thinking of, mother, to let such a child go out alone?”