“Oh, I see,” he said.  “Offended, is she?  Paying me out for having paid so little court to her?  Well, she’s right there too, bless her!  But never mind!  You’re a decidedly good-looking little woman, my dear, and if I have neglected you thus far, I intend to make up for it during the honeymoon.  So come, little gal, let’s be friends.”

Taking hold of me again, he tried to kiss me, putting at the same time his hand on the bosom of my dress, but I twisted my face aside and prevented him.

“Oh!  Oh!  Hurt her modesty, have I?” he said, laughing like a man who was quite sure both of himself and of me.  “But my little nun will get over that by and by.  Wait awhile!  Wait awhile!”

By this time I was trembling with the shock of a terror that was entirely new to me.  I could not explain to myself the nature of it, but it was there, and I could not escape from it.

Hitherto, when I had thought of my marriage to Lord Raa I had been troubled by the absence of love between us; and what I meant to myself by love—­the love of husband and wife—­was the kind of feeling I had for the Reverend Mother, heightened and deepened and spiritualised, as I believed, by the fact (with all its mysterious significance) that the one was a man and the other a woman.

But this was something quite different.  Not having found in marriage what I had expected, I was finding something else, for there could be no mistaking my husband’s meaning when he looked at me with his passionate eyes and said, “Wait awhile!”

I saw what was before me, and in fear of it I found myself wishing that something might happen to save me.  I was so frightened that if I could have escaped from the car I should have done so.  The only thing I could hope for was that we should arrive at Blackwater too late for the steamer, or that the storm would prevent it from sailing.  What relief from my situation I should find in that, beyond the delay of one day, one night (in which I imagined I might be allowed to return home), I did not know.  But none the less on that account I began to watch the clouds with a feverish interest.

They were wilder than ever now—­rolling up from the south-west in huge black whorls which enveloped the mountains and engulfed the valleys.  The wind, too, was howling at intervals like a beast being slaughtered.  It was terrible, but not so terrible as the thing I was thinking of.  I was afraid of the storm, and yet I was fearfully, frightfully glad of it.

My husband, who, after my repulse, had dropped back into his own corner of the car, was very angry.  He talked again of our “God-forsaken island,” and the folly of living in it, said our passage would be a long one in any case, and we might lose our connection to London.

“Damnably inconvenient if we do.  I’ve special reasons for being there in the morning,” he said.

At a sharp turn of the road the wind smote the car as with an invisible wing.  One of the windows was blown in, and to prevent the rain from driving on to us my husband had to hold up a cushion in the gap.