She saw the horizontal poles too late.One of them had rolled from its place and lay on the ground, and she trod on it, was thrown forward against the heap, and, in her blind effort to recover herself, slipped and fell into a narrow, grassed hollow behind it, clutching at the hedge.The great French doctor had not been quite right.For the first time in her life she felt herself sinking into bottomless darkness--which was what happened to people when they fainted.
When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, because on one side of her rose the low mass of the hop poles, and on the other was the long-untrimmed hedge, which had thrown out a thick, sheltering growth and curved above her like a penthouse.Was she awakening, after all? No, because the pain was awakening with her, and she could hear, what seemed at first to be quite loud sounds.She could not have been unconscious long, for she almost immediately recognised that they were the echo of a man's hurried foot-steps upon the bare wooden stairway, leading to the bedrooms in the empty house.Having secured the horses, Nigel had returned to the cottage, and, finding her gone had rushed to the upper floor in search of her.He was calling her name angrily, his voice resounding in the emptiness of the rooms.
"Betty; don't play the fool with me!"
She cautiously drew herself further under cover, making sure that no end of her habit remained in sight.The over-growth of the hedge was her salvation.If she had seen the spot by daylight, she would not have thought it a possible place of concealment.
Once she had read an account of a woman's frantic flight from a murderer who was hunting her to her death, while she slipped from one poor hiding place to another, sometimes crouching behind walls or bushes, sometimes lying flat in long grass, once wading waist-deep through a stream, and at last finding a miserable little fastness, where she hid shivering for hours, until her enemy gave up his search.One never felt the reality of such histories, but there was actually a sort of parallel in this.Mad and crude things were let loose, and the world of ordinary life seemed thousands of miles away.
She held her breath, for he was leaving the house by the front door.She heard his footsteps on the bricked path, and then in the lane.He went to the road, and the sound of his feet died away for a few moments.Then she heard them returning--he was back in the lane--on the brick path, and stood listening or, perhaps, reflecting.He muttered something exclamatory, and she heard a match struck, and shortly afterwards he moved across the garden patch towards the little spinney.He had thought of it, as she had believed he would.He would not think of this place, and in the end he might get tired or awakened to a sense of his lurid folly, and realise that it would be safer for him to go back to Stornham with some clever lie, trusting to his belief that there existed no girl but would shrink from telling such a story in connection with a man who would brazenly deny it with contemptuous dramatic detail.If he would but decide on this, she would be safe--and it would be so like him that she dared to hope.But, if he did not, she would lie close, even if she must wait until morning, when some labourer's cart would surely pass, and she would hear it jolting, and drag herself out, and call aloud in such a way that no man could be deaf.There was more room under her hedge than she had thought, and she found that she could sit up, by clasping her knees and bending her head, while she listened to every sound, even to the rustle of the grass in the wind sweeping across the marsh.
She moved very gradually and slowly, and had just settled into utter motionlessness when she realised that he was coming back through the garden--the straggling currant and gooseberry bushes were being trampled through.
"Betty, go home," Rosalie had pleaded."Go home--go home." And she had refused, because she could not desert her.
She held her breath and pressed her hand against her side, because her heart beat, as it seemed to her, with an actual sound.He moved with unsteady steps from one point to another, more than once he stumbled, and his angry oath reached her; at last he was so near her hiding place that his short hard breathing was a distinct sound.A moment later he spoke, raising his voice, which fact brought to her a rush of relief, through its signifying that he had not even guessed her nearness.
"My dear Betty," he said, "you have the pluck of the devil, but circumstances are too much for you.You are not on the road, and I have been through the spinney.Mere logic convinces me that you cannot be far away.You may as well give the thing up.It will be better for you.""You who died to-day--do not leave me," was Betty's inward cry, and she dropped her face on her knees.
"I am not a pleasant-tempered fellow, as you know, and Iam losing my hold on myself.The wind is blowing the mist away, and there will be a moon.I shall find you, my good girl, in half an hour's time--and then we shall be jolly well even."She had not dropped her whip, and she held it tight.If, when the moonlight revealed the pile of hop poles to him, he suspected and sprang at them to tear them away, she would be given strength to make one spring, even in her agony, and she would strike at his eyes--awfully, without one touch of compunction--she would strike--strike.
There was a brief silence, and then a match was struck again, and almost immediately she inhaled the fragrance of an excellent cigar.