"Out of the way, idiot!" was the next thing she heard, in a voice that made her heart beat; and in a moment the man had been sent reeling against the opposite wall.
That was the work of an instant. Inflamed with rage and fury, he recovered himself, and was about to aim a blow at his assailant's face, when Anerley's left arm so successfully did duty without the aid of the wounded right one, that the man went down like a log, and lay there. His companion, stupefied, neither stirred nor spoke.
"Get into the cab, Miss Brunel," said Will, abruptly.
He accompanied her across the pavement: an utter stranger could not have been more calm and cold. For a second she looked into his face, with pain, and wonder, and entreaty in her eyes; and then she took his hand, which had been outstretched to bid her good-bye, and said—
"Won't you come with me? I—I am afraid——"
He got into the cab; the driver mounted his box and drove off; and so it was that Will, scarcely knowing how it had come about, found himself sitting once more beside Annie Brunel, with her hand still closed upon his.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A LAST WORD.
Every one knows Noel Paton's 'Dante and Beatrice'—the picture of the two lovers caught together in a supreme moment of passion—their faces irradiated with the magical halo of a glowing twilight. His, tender, entreating, wistful, worshipful; hers, full of the unconscious sweetness and superb repose of a rare and exalted beauty. His eyes are upturned to hers; but hers dwell vaguely on the western glow of colour. And there is in the picture more than one thing which suggests the strange dissociation and the sadness, as well as the intercommunion and fellowship, of the closest love.
Why, asks the impatient reader, should not a romance be always full of this glow, and colour, and passion? The warm light that touches the oval outline of a tender woman's face is a beautiful thing, and even the sadness of love is beautiful: why should not a romance be full of these supreme elements? Why should not the romancist cut out the long prose passages of a man's life, and give us only those wonderful moments in which being glows with a sort of transformation?