Winsome did not hasten.  Why hasten, when at the end of the way there certainly lies the sweet beginning of all things.  Already might she be happy in the possession of certainties?  It never occurred to her that Ralph would not be at the trysting-place.  That a messenger might fail did not once cross her mind.  But maidenly tremours, delicious in their uncertainty, coursed along her limbs and through all her being.  Could any one have seen, there was a large and almost exultant happiness in the depths of her eyes.  Her lips were parted a little, like a child that waits on tiptoe to see the curtain rise on some wondrous and long-dreamed-of spectacle.

Soon against the darker sky the hill dyke stood up, looking in the gloom massive as the Picts’ Wall of long ago.  It followed irregularly the ridgy dips and hollows downward, till it ran into the in tenser darkness of the pines.  In a moment, ere yet she was ready, there before her was the gate of her tryst.  She paused, affrighted for the first time.  She listened, and there was no sound.  A trembling came over her and an uncertainty.  She turned, in act to flee.

But out of the dark of the great dyke stepped a figure cloaked from head to heel, and while Winsome wavered, tingling now with shame and fear, in an instant she was enclosed within two very strong arms, that received her as in a snare a bird is taken.

Suddenly Winsome felt her breath shorten.  She panted as if she could not get air, like the bird as it nutters and palpitates.

“Oh, I ought not to have come!” &he said, “but I could not help it!”

There was no word in answer, only a closer folding of the arms that cinctured her.  In the west the dusk was lightening and the eyelid of the night drew slowly and grimly up.

When for the first time she looked shyly upward, Winsome found herself in the arms of Agnew Greatorix.  Wrapped in his great military cloak, with a triumphant look in his handsome face, he smiled down upon her.

Great Lord of Innocence! give now this lamb of thine thy help!

The leaping soul of pure disembodied terror stood in Winsome’s eyes.  Fascinated like an antelope in the coils of a python she gazed, her eyes dilating and contracting—­the world whirling about her, the soul of her bounding and panting to burst its bars.

“Winsome, my darling!” he said, “you have come to me.  You are mine”—­bending his face to hers.

Not yet had the power to speak or to resist come back to her, so instant and terrible was her surprise.  But at the first touch of his lips upon her cheek the very despair brought back to her tenfold her own strength.  She pushed against him with her hands, straining him from her by the rigid tension of her arms, setting her face far from his, but she was still unable to break the clasp of his arms about her.

“Let me go! let me go!” she cried, in a hoarse and labouring whisper.