‘I will see,’ replied her companion.  They were the first words he had uttered.

The voice was so different from her brother’s that she was terrified; her limbs quivered.  In another instant the speaker had struck a wax vesta, and holding it erect in his fingers he looked her in the face.

‘Hee-hee-hee!’ The laugher was her husband the viscount.

He laughed again, and his eyes gleamed like a couple of tarnished brass buttons in the light of the wax match.

Ethelberta might have fallen dead with the shock, so terrible and hideous was it.  Yet she did not.  She neither shrieked nor fainted; but no poor January fieldfare was ever colder, no ice-house more dank with perspiration, than she was then.

’A very pleasant joke, my dear—­hee-hee!  And no more than was to be expected on this merry, happy day of our lives.  Nobody enjoys a good jest more than I do:  I always enjoyed a jest—­hee-hee!  Now we are in the dark again; and we will alight and walk.  The path is too narrow for the carriage, but it will not be far for you.  Take your husband’s arm.’

While he had been speaking a defiant pride had sprung up in her, instigating her to conceal every weakness.  He had opened the carriage door and stepped out.  She followed, taking the offered arm.

‘Take the horse and carriage to the stables,’ said the viscount to the coachman, who was his own servant, the vehicle and horse being also his.  The coachman turned the horse’s head and vanished down the woodland track by which they had ascended.

The viscount moved on, uttering private chuckles as numerous as a woodpecker’s taps, and Ethelberta with him.  She walked as by a miracle, but she would walk.  She would have died rather than not have walked then.

She perceived now that they were somewhere in Enckworth wood.  As they went, she noticed a faint shine upon the ground on the other side of the viscount, which showed her that they were walking beside a wet ditch.  She remembered having seen it in the morning:  it was a shallow ditch of mud.  She might push him in, and run, and so escape before he could extricate himself.  It would not hurt him.  It was her last chance.  She waited a moment for the opportunity.

‘We are one to one, and I am the stronger!’ she at last exclaimed triumphantly, and lifted her hand for a thrust.

’On the contrary, darling, we are one to half-a-dozen, and you considerably the weaker,’ he tenderly replied, stepping back adroitly, and blowing a whistle.  At once the bushes seemed to be animated in four or five places.

‘John?’ he said, in the direction of one of them.

‘Yes, my lord,’ replied a voice from the bush, and a keeper came forward.

‘William?’

Another man advanced from another bush.

‘Quite right.  Remain where you are for the present.  Is Tomkins there?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said a man from another part of the thicket.