But his jealousy took on a note of melancholy and of humility.  He worshiped her so and wished to feel her all his own.  She listened entranced, forgetting her terrors, her disappointments, the vague ennui which had assailed her of late.  She yielded herself to the delights of his caresses, to the joy of this hour of solitude and rapture.  The night was close and stormy; from afar, muffled peals of thunder echoed through the gigantic elms, whilst vivid flashes of lightning weirdly lit up at times the mysterious figure of this romantic lover, with his face forever in shadow, one eye forever hidden behind a black band, his voice forever muffled.

But it was a tempestuous wooing, a renewal of that happy evening in the spring—­oh! so long ago it seemed now!—­when first he had poured in her ear the wild torrents of his love.  The girl—­so young, so inexperienced, so romantic—­was literally swept off her feet; she listened to his wild words, yielded her lips to his kiss, and whilst she half feared the impetuosity of his mood, she delighted in the very terrors it evoked.

A secret marriage?  Why, of course! since he suffered so terribly through not feeling her all his own.  Soon!—­at once!—­at Dover before the clergyman at All Souls, with whom he—­her prince—­had already spoken.

Yes! it would have to be at Dover, for the neighboring villages might prove too dangerous.  Sir Marmaduke might hear of it, mayhap.  It would rest with her to free herself for one day.

Then came that delicious period of scheming, of stage-managing everything for the all-important day.  He would arrange about a chaise, and she should walk up to the Canterbury Road to meet it.  He would await her in the church at Dover, for ’twas best that they should not be seen together until after the happy knot was tied, when he declared that he would be ready to defy the universe.

It had been a long interview, despite the tempest that raged above and around them.  The great branches of the elms groaned and cracked under fury of the wind, the thunder pealed overhead and then died away with slow majesty out towards the sea.  From afar could be heard the angry billows dashing themselves against the cliffs.

They had to seek shelter under the colonnaded porch of the summerhouse, and Sue had much ado to keep the heavy drops of rain from reaching her shoes and the bottom of her kirtle.

But she was attune with the storm, she loved to hear the weird sh-sh-sh of the leaves, the monotonous drip of the rain on the roof of the summer house, and in the intervals of intense blackness to catch sight of her lover’s face, pale of hue, with one large eye glancing cyclops-like into hers, as a vivid flash of lightning momentarily tore the darkness asunder and revealed him still crouching at her feet.

Intense lassitude followed the wild mental turmoil of that night.  She had arranged to meet him again two days hence in order to repeat to him what she had heard the while of Sir Marmaduke’s movements, and when she was like to be free to go to Dover.  During those intervening two days she tried hard to probe her own thoughts; her mind, her feelings:  but what she found buried in the innermost recesses of her heart frightened her so, that she gave up thinking.