"But, Cripps, dear Cripps, do try to let me speak! They might have broken thirty pickaxes, but I had nothing at all to do with it. May I get up? Oh, may I get up? It is the only chance of saving me. I hear a horse tearing through the wood! Oh, dear, clever Cripps, you will repent it for the rest of all your life. Even Dobbin is sharper than you are."
"You blessed old ass!" cried a stern young voice, as Kit Sharp (who had meant not to show) rushed forward, "there is no time for your heavy brain to work. You shall have the young lady, dead or alive! Pardon me, Grace—no help for it. Now, thick-headed bumpkin, put one arm round her, and off at full gallop with your old screw! If you give her up I will hang you by the neck to the tail of your broken rattletrap!"
"Oh, Cripps, dear Cripps, I assure you on my honour," said Grace, as tossed up by her lover, she sat in the seat of Esther, "I have never been dead any more than you have. I can't tell you now; oh, drive on, drive, if you have a spark of manhood in you!"
A horse and horseman came out of the wood, about fifty yards behind them, and Grace would have fallen headlong, but for the half-reluctant arm of Cripps, as Dobbin with a jump (quite unknown in his very first assay of harness) set off full gallop over rut and rock, with a blow on his back, from the fist of Kit, like the tumble of a chimney-pot.
Then Christopher Sharp, after one sad look at Grace Oglander's flying figure, turned round to confront his father.
"What means all this?" cried the lawyer fiercely, being obliged to rein up his horse, unless he would trample Kit underfoot.
"It means this," answered his son, with firm gaze, and strong grasp of his bridle, "that you have made a great mistake, sir—that you must give up your plan altogether—that the poor young lady who has been so deceived——"
"Let go my bridle, will you? Am I to stop here—to be baffled by you? Idiot, let go my bridle!"
"Father, you shall not—for your own sake, you shall not! I may be an idiot, but I will not be a blackguard——"
"If by the time I have counted three, your hand is on my bridle, I will knock you down, and ride over you!"