‘Let me go,’ she cried faintly.  ‘Let me go.’

‘Oh, you will be let go fast enough—­the other side of the water,’ he answered, with a villainous laugh.  ’I’m bail to that.  In the meantime keep a still tongue, or it will be the worse for you!  Once out of Bristol, and you may pipe as you like!’

The girl fell back in her corner with a low wail of despair.  The man seeing the effect he had wrought, laughed his triumph, and in sheer brutality passed his light once or twice across her face.  Then he closed the door with a crash and mounted; the carriage bounded forward again, and in a trice was travelling onward as rapidly as before.

Night had set in, and darkness, a darkness that could almost be felt, reigned in the interior of the chaise.  Neither of the travellers could now see the other, though they sat within arm’s length.  The tutor, as soon as they were well started, and his nerves, shaken by the man’s threats, permitted him to think of anything save his own safety, began to wonder that his companion, who had been so forward before, did not now speak; to look for her to speak, and to find the darkness and this silence, which left him to feed on his fears, strangely uncomfortable.  He could almost believe that she was no longer there.  At length, unable to bear it longer, he spoke.

‘I suppose you know,’ he said—­he was growing vexed with the girl who had brought him into this peril—­’who is at the bottom of this?’

She did not answer, or rather she answered only by a sudden burst of weeping; not the light, facile weeping of a woman crossed or over-fretted, or frightened; but the convulsive heart-rending sobbing of utter grief and abandonment.

The tutor heard, and was at first astonished, then alarmed.  ’My dear, good girl, don’t cry like that,’ he said awkwardly.  ’Don’t!  I—­I don’t understand it.  You—­you frighten me.  You—­you really should not.  I only asked you if you knew whose work this was.’

‘I know!  I know only too well!’ she cried passionately.  ’God help me!  God help all women!’

Mr. Thomasson wondered whether she referred to the future and her own fate.  In that case, her complete surrender to despair seemed strange, seemed even inexplicable, in one who a few minutes before had shown a spirit above a woman’s.  Or did she know something that he did not know?  Something that caused this sudden collapse.  The thought increased his uneasiness; the coward dreads everything, and his nerves were shaken.  ‘Pish! pish!’ he said pettishly.  ’You should not give way like that!  You should not, you must not give way!’

‘And why not?’ she cried, arresting her sobs.  There was a ring of expectation in her voice, a hoping against hope.  He fancied that she had lowered her hands and was peering at him.

‘Because we—­we may yet contrive something’ he answered lamely.  ’We—­we may be rescued.  Indeed—­I am sure we shall be rescued,’ he continued, fighting his fears as well as hers.