He held it open that she might pass through; and he followed her into the hall. He little dreamt that, as she walked before him, she was wondering, almost with terror, whether he would go out with her or leave her; whether this was all she was to see of him, day by day. The doubt was not solved; for they were interrupted. As they entered the shady hall by one door Lady Betty darted into it from the terrace, her face scarlet, her hat crushed, her eyes sparkling with rage. They were so near her she could not escape them; nor could she hide her disorder. "Why, Betty," Sophia cried in astonishment, "what is it? What in the world is the matter?"
"Don't ask me," Betty cried, almost weeping. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You--your brother has insulted me! He has held me and kissed me against my will! And he laughed at me! He laughed at me! Oh, I could kill him!"
CHAPTER XXIV
[WHO PLAYS, PAYS]
It must be confessed that the flicker of skirts with which Lady Betty ran down the steps when she started for her airing, still more a certain toss of the head that was its perfect complement, gave her mischievous soul huge delight; for she had watched a French maid, and knew them to be pure nature, and the very quintessence of the singing chambermaid's art. It was not impossible that as she executed them she had a person in her eye and meant him to profit by them; for by-and-by she repeated the performance at a point where two paths diverged, and where it put the fitting close to a very pretty pause of indecision. Tom was so hard on her heels that ordinary ears must have detected his tread; but that my lady heard nothing was proved by the fact that she chose the more retired track and tripped along it, humming and darting from flower to flower like some dainty insect let loose among the bracken.
She plucked at will, and buried her shapely little nose in the blossoms; she went on, she stopped, she went on again, and Tom let her go; until the path, after winding round a low spreading oak that closed the view from the house, began to descend into a sunny dell where it ran, a green ribbon of sward, through waist-high fern, leapt the brook by a single plank, and scaled the steeper side by tiny zig-zags.
On the hither side of this summer hollow, sleepy with the warm hum of bees and scent of thyme, Tom overtook her, and never sure was any one so surprised and overwhelmed as this poor maid.
"La, sir, I declare you frightened my heart into my mouth," she cried, pressing a white hand to her bodice and looking timidly at him from the shelter of her straw hat. "I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir," with a curtsey. "I would not have come here, if I'd known, for the world."
"No, child?"
"No, sir, indeed I would not!"