While he had been speaking a defiant pride had sprung up in her, instigating her to conceal every weakness. He had opened the carriage door and stepped out. She followed, taking the offered arm.
‘Take the horse and carriage to the stables,’ said the viscount to the coachman, who was his own servant, the vehicle and horse being also his. The coachman turned the horse’s head and vanished down the woodland track by which they had ascended.
The viscount moved on, uttering private chuckles as numerous as a woodpecker’s taps, and Ethelberta with him. She walked as by a miracle, but she would walk. She would have died rather than not have walked then.
She perceived now that they were somewhere in Enckworth wood. As they went, she noticed a faint shine upon the ground on the other side of the viscount, which showed her that they were walking beside a wet ditch. She remembered having seen it in the morning: it was a shallow ditch of mud. She might push him in, and run, and so escape before he could extricate himself. It would not hurt him. It was her last chance. She waited a moment for the opportunity.
‘We are one to one, and I am the stronger!’ she at last exclaimed triumphantly, and lifted her hand for a thrust.
‘On the contrary, darling, we are one to half-a-dozen, and you considerably the weaker,’ he tenderly replied, stepping back adroitly, and blowing a whistle. At once the bushes seemed to be animated in four or five places.
‘John?’ he said, in the direction of one of them.
‘Yes, my lord,’ replied a voice from the bush, and a keeper came forward.
‘William?’
Another man advanced from another bush.