Oakburn, and a black shawl was thrown over her head and shoulders. She stepped swiftly down the narrow side-path which led from this entrance to the foot of the garden, and plunged amidst the thick trees there. It was between eight and nine o’clock, and but for this watery moon would have been quite dark. Laura was later than she had wished to be. Captain Chesney was about again now, and it had pleased him to keep the tea waiting on the table, before he allowed Jane to make it. Laura sat in a fever of impatience; was Mr. Carlton waiting for her?—and would he go away? Swallowing down one cup of tea hastily, Laura declined more, and, saying she had a headache, quitted the room.
Unheeding the drops of rain which began to fall, unheeding the many drops which fell when the shrubs and trees were shaken, Laura plunged into their midst. Leaning against the trunk of one that was thicker than the rest, stood Mr. Carlton. Laura, who was in a state of perpetual and continuous terror during these interviews, flew to him for shelter.
“O, Lewis, I feared you would be gone! I thought I should never get away to-night. Papa was reading the newspaper, and Jane would not make the tea unless he told her. I dared not come away until it was made, because they would have been calling me to it.”
“Only one night more, Laura, and then it will be over,” was his soothing answer.
At least, he had meant it to soothe. But the step she was about to take seemed to yawn before Laura then in all its naked and appalling sternness.
“I don’t know that I can do it,” she murmured with a shiver. “It is an awful thing. Do you mind me, Lewis?—an awful thing.”
“What is?” asked Mr. Carlton.
“The running away from my father’s home. I have read of it in books, but I never knew any one who did it in real life; and now that the time is coming close, I cannot tell you how I seem to shrink from it. We have been brought up to be so obedient.”
“Hush, Laura! You are falling into an unnecessarily grave view of this.”
She did not answer aloud, but she began asking herself whether too grave a view could be taken of a daughter’s leaving clandestinely her father’s home. Laura’s conscience was unusually alive to-night. A glimmer of the watery moon fell on her face through the trees, and Mr. Carlton saw how grave was its expression. He divined her thoughts, as by instinct, and answered them.
“Laura, believe me, you can take too grave a view of it. When a father is unreasonably despotic, a daughter is justified in breaking through her trammels. Surely you are not wavering! Laura, Laura! you will not be the one to frustrate our plans! you will not draw back from me at the last hour!”
She burst into tears. “No, I would not draw back from you,” she sobbed. “But—I don’t know how it is, I feel to-night frightened at everything; frightened above all at the unknown future.”
Mr. Carlton did his best to reassure her. Loving arguments, all too specious; sophistries, whose falseness was lost in their sweetness, were poured into her ear. It was but the old story; one that has been enacted many a time before, that will be enacted many a time again; where inclination and conscience are at war, and the latter yields.
“I could not live without you,” he passionately reiterated. “You must not draw back. now.”
It may be that she felt she could not live without him. She suffered herself to be soothed, to be satisfied. Gradually, one by one, her scruples melted away from her sight; and she discussed with him finally their plans for getting away undetected, unpursued. The time for their purposed flitting was drawing very near; four-and-twenty hours more would bring it.
But it grew late; time for Mr. Carlton to be away, and for Laura to be in-doors again, lest she should be missed. Mr. Carlton, with many a last word and many another, at length quitted her. Laura remained for a few minutes where she was, to still the beating of her agitated heart, to live over again the sweet, stolen interview; only a few hours, and, if all went well, she should belong to him for ever.
The shrubs and trees around afforded a secure shelter. It was pretty dry there, and she had suffered the shawl to fall from her shoulders, never heeding where. But now she turned to look for it, and just at that moment the moon burst from behind a cloud, and Laura looked up at its glitter through the leaves of the trees. It was brighter then than it had been yet that night.
Gathering up the shawl, she had thrown it round her, when a cry escaped her lips, and every pulse in her beating heart stood still. There, amidst the trees, stood some one watching her; some one that certainly bore the form of a human being, but a strange one. It struggled itself forward and came nearer; near enough to speak in a whisper, and be heard:
“Laura Chesney, what have you to do with Lewis Carlton?”
She stood paralysed with fright, with awe, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and saying