The women looked at each other in silence, and both heard the needles shaken through the darkness above them.  Mrs. Lawler stood by the stile, her hand was laid on the paling.  At last Olive said: 

’Let me pass.  I will not listen to you any longer; nor do I believe a word you have said.  We all know what you are; you are a bad woman whom no one will visit.  Let me pass!’ and pushing passionately forward she attempted to cross the stile.  Then Mrs. Lawler took her by the shoulder and threw her roughly back.  She fell to the ground heavily.

‘Now you had better get up and go home,’ said Mrs. Lawler, and she approached the prostrate girl.  ’I didn’t mean to hurt you; but you shan’t elope with Teddy if I can prevent it.  Why don’t you get up?’

‘Oh! my leg, my leg; you have broken my leg!’

‘Let me help you up.’

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Olive, attempting to rise; but the moment she put her right foot to the ground she shrieked with pain, and fell again.

’Well, if you are going to take it in that way, you may remain where you are, and I can’t go and ring them up at Brookfield.  I don’t think there will be much eloping done to-night, so farewell.’

XXVI

About ten o’clock on the night of Olive’s elopement, Alice knocked tremblingly at her mother’s door.

‘Mother,’ she said, ’Olive is not in her room, nor yet in the house; I have looked for her everywhere.’

‘She is downstairs with her father in the studio,’ said Mrs. Barton; and, signing to her daughter to be silent, she led her out of hearing of Barnes, who was folding and putting some dresses away in the wardrobe.

‘I have been down to the studio,’ Alice replied in a whisper.

’Then I am afraid she has run away with Captain Hibbert.  But we shall gain nothing by sending men out with lanterns and making a fuss; by this time she is well on her way to Dublin.  She might have done better than Captain Hibbert, but she might also have done worse.  She will write to us in a few days to tell us that she is married, and to beg of us to forgive her.’

And that night Mrs. Barton slept even more happily, with her mind more completely at rest, than usual; whereas Alice, fevered with doubt and apprehension, lay awake.  At seven o’clock she was at her window, watching the grey morning splinter into sunlight over the quiet fields.  Through the mist the gamekeeper came, and another man, carrying a woman between them, and the suspicion that her sister might have been killed in an agrarian outrage gripped her heart like an iron hand.  She ran downstairs, and, rushing across the gravel, opened the wicket-gate.  Olive was moaning with pain, but her moans were a sweet reassurance in Alice’s ears, and without attempting to understand the man’s story of how Miss Olive had sprained her ankle in crossing the stile in their wood, and how he had found her as he was going his rounds, she gave the man five shillings, thanked him, and sent him away.  Barnes and the butler then carried Olive upstairs, and in the midst of much confusion Mr. Barton rode down the avenue in quest of Dr. Reed—­galloped down the avenue, his pale hair blowing in the breeze.