Then impulse proved too much for him.
He bent forward, and pressed his lips just once on that olive-brown
cheek. "But I may come back again very soon," he murmured, pushing
home his advantage.
Elma seized his hand in hers, wrung it hard and tremulously, and
then turned and ran like a frightened fawn, without pausing to look
back, down the path homeward. Yet she whispered one broken sentence
through her tears, for all that, before she went.
"I shall love you always; but spare me, spare me."
And Cyril was left behind by himself in the wood, completely
mystified.
CHAPTER XVI.
STRUGGLE AND VICTORY.
Elma hurried home full of intense misgivings. She dreaded having
to meet her mother's eye. How on earth could she hide from that
searching glance the whole truth as to what had happened in the
wood that morning? When she reached home, however, she learned to
her relief, from the maid who opened the door to her, that their
neighbour, Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the distinguished Q.C., had
dropped in for lunch, and this chance diversion supplied Elma with
a little fresh courage to face the inevitable. She went straight
up to her own room the moment she entered the house, without seeing
her mother, and there she waited, bathing her face copiously till
some minutes after the lunch bell had rung.
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