She was thus engaged, when softly over the velvet turf came Anthony, leading his horse.
"Let me look," said he, bluntly; "let me tie up your rags. How did you injure your knuckles?"
"We men," said Anthony, "when we are angry, hurt each other, but you women, I suppose, hurt your own selves?"
"Yes. We have not the strength or the means to hurt others. Not that we lack the will--so we hurt ourselves. I would rather have bitten some one else, but I could not, so I tore my own hands--with my teeth."
"You are strange beings, you women," said Anthony.
Then he threw the bridle on the ground, and set his foot on it, so as to disengage his own hands.
He took hold of Urith's wrist, and the kerchiefs, one after the other, and arranged the bandages, and fastened them firmly. Whilst thus engaged, he suddenly looked up, and caught her sombre eyes fixed intently on him.
"Would you hurt me--bite and mangle me?" he asked, with a laugh.
"Assuredly, if I had the occasion and the opportunity."
"Which latter I would not be such a fool as to allow you."
"Opportunities come--are not made and given."
"You are a strange girl," he said; holding her hands by the bandaged knots at the wrists, and looking into her gloomy eyes; "I should be sorry to rouse the wild beast in you--there is one curled up in your heart--that I can see. Your eyes are the entrance to its lair."
"Yes," answered Urith, without shrinking, "it is true there is a wild beast in me."
"And you obey the wild beast. It stretched itself and sniffed the moor air--than away you ran out into the wilderness."
He continued to study her face; that exercised a strange fascination upon him.
"Yes; I was in one of my fits. I was angry, and when I am angry I have no reason--no thought--no feelings, nothing save anger. Just as the moor now is--all fire; and the fire consumes everything. I could not hurt my mother--I did not want to hurt my Uncle Solomon. That other---- He was beyond my reach, and so I bit myself."
Anthony made an attempt to shake himself free from the sensation that stole over his senses, a sensation of giddiness. The effort was ineffectual, it lacked resoluteness, and again the spell settled over him; he was falling into a dream, with his hands on her wrists, and her pulses throbbing against his fingers, a dream woven about him, enlacing, entangling mind and heart and consciousness; a dream in which he was losing all power of seeing anything save her eyes, of hearing anything save her breathing, of feeling anything save the dull throb of her pulse--a dream in which he was being caught and bound, and thrown powerless at her feet--a dream of mingled rapture and pain and undefined terror. She had called herself his captive a little while ago, and now she, without a word or a movement, was subjecting him absolutely.