“You mustn’t, I say!” she cried. “I can’t help it! Don’t blame me for it! Don’t ask me to explain, but you must not go out this way!”
She stood by her task now from a new motive, one that impelled more strongly than her fear of being reproached and derided by Elizabeth. Her own self-esteem was enlisted, and she was now determined not to incur her own reproach and derision. She perceived, too, with a sentimental woman’s sense of the dramatic, that, though denied a drama of her own in which she might figure as heroine, here was, in another’s drama, a scene entirely hers, and she was resolved to act it out with honor. Circumstances had not favored her with a romance, but here, in another’s romance, was a chapter exclusively hers, a chapter, moreover, on whose proper termination the very continuation of the romance depended. So she would hold that door, at any cost.
Peyton regarded her for another moment of silence.
“Oh, well,” said he, at last, “I can go the other way.”
And, to her dismay, he strode towards the door of the east hall. She could not possibly outrun him thither. Her heart sank. The killing sense 213 of failure benumbed her body. He was already at the door,—was about to open it. At that instant he stepped back into the parlor. In through the doorway, that he was about to traverse, came Elizabeth.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CONQUEST.
Miss Sally saw at a glance that her niece was dressed for conquest; then, with immense relief and supreme exultation, but with a feeling of exhaustion, knowing that her work was done, she silently left the room by the door she had guarded, closed it noiselessly behind her, and went up-stairs to restore her worked-out energies.