She took a breath before she moved.

Vernon strode out of the house.

Clara swept up to Laetitia.

“You were deceived!”

The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

“I want air:  I must be by myself,” said Clara, catching at her garden-hat.

She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right, to avoid the laboratory windows.

CHAPTER XXXIII

IN WHICH THE COMIC MUSE HAS AN EYE ON TWO GOOD SOULS

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels.  She asked him where her father was.

“Don’t speak to him now,” said Vernon.

“Mr. Whitford, will you?”

“It is not advisable just now.  Wait.”

“Wait?  Why not now?”

“He is not in the right humour.”

She choked.  There are times when there is no medicine for us in sages, we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear.  On she sped, as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with a post.

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her head, except the burden and result of it, that he held to her fast, would neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

Oh, men! men!  They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her understanding.  Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of their tyranny, clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power.  She was not the less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense of the justice of what could be said to reprove her.  She had but one answer:  “Anything but marry him!” It threw her on her nature, our last and headlong advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry us from the heights to our level, and lower, if there be accidental gaps in the channel.  For say we have been guilty of misconduct:  can we redeem it by violating that which we are and live by?  The question sinks us back to the luxuriousness of a sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction against tide.  Our nature becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of the enemy, confidently citing its cause for being frankly elvish or worse.  Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be surrendered.  She shut her eyes from it:  the sight carried her too violently to her escape; but her heart caught it up and huzzaed.  To press the points of her fingers at her bosom, looking up to the sky as she did, and cry:  “I am not my own; I am his!” was instigation sufficient to make her heart leap up with all her body’s blush to urge it to recklessness.  A despairing creature then may say she has addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain her.

Happily for Miss Middleton, she had walked some minutes in her chafing fit before the falcon eye of Colonel De Craye spied her away on one of the beech-knots.