"Save you! It is he that dooms you! He has given you up to any fate that I shall decree!"
"Liar! away! I defy you. You dare not, ruffian! Your foul threat is but meant to frighten me."
The creeping terrors of her voice, as she spoke, contradicted the tenor of her speech. Her fears—quite as extreme as he sought to make them—were fully evinced in her trembling accents.
"Frighten you!" answered the ruffian. "Frighten you! why, not so difficult a matter either! But it is as easy to do, as to threaten—to make you feel as to make you fear—and why not? why should you not become the thing at once for which you have been long destined? Once certainly mine, Lucy Munro, you will abandon the silly notion that you can be anything to Ralph Colleton! Come!—"
Her shrieks answered him. He clapped his handkerchief upon her mouth.
"Uncle! uncle! save me!"
She was half stifled—she felt breath and strength failing. Her brutal assailant was hauling her away, with a force to which she could no longer oppose resistance; and with a single half-ejaculated prayer—"Oh, God! be merciful!" she sunk senselessly at his feet, even as a falling corse.