"Let me go! Let me go!"
He released her wrist, dragging the crop from her grasp. He snapped it in two and flung the pieces aside. The slight noise steadied him. It seemed symbolic of the snapping of his intended fate. She drew slowly back, chafing the wrist he had held. Her face let escape the desire to hurt, to hurt hard.
"Someone else will have the strength," she whispered. "You'll be punished, you—you—stable boy."
She forced her way blindly through the hedge. Responding to his custom he started automatically after her to hold her stirrup. She faced him, raising her hands.
"Keep away from me, you beast!"
Unaided, she sprang into her saddle and started home at a hard gallop.
George glanced around thoughtfully. He was quite calm now. The familiar landscape appeared strangely distorted. Was that his temper, or a reflection from his altered destiny? He didn't know how the deuce he could do it, but he was going to justify himself. Maybe the real situation had never been explained to her, and, as the price of her companionship, he had, perhaps, let her hold him too cheaply; but now he was going to show her that he was, indeed, instead of a servant, a human being, capable of making his boasts good.
He picked up the two pieces of her riding crop and thrust them into his pocket. They impressed him as a necessary souvenir of his humiliation, a reminder of what he had to do. She had hurt. Oh, Lord! How she had hurt! He experienced a hot desire to hurt back. The scar could only be healed, he told himself, if some day he could strike at her beautiful, contemptuous body as hard as she had just now struck at him.
II
He mounted and pressed his horse, but he had only one or two glimpses of Sylvia, far ahead, using her spurs, from time to time raising her hand as if she had forgotten that her crop had been torn from her, broken, and thrown aside.