This latter argument had its full weight with Evangeline: she embraced her sister with ardent weeping tenderness, and, with many oft-repeated kisses, tore herself away.
Helen wept too, and convulsively. She stood motionless until after Evangeline had, with light fleeting step, entered the house, and then she prepared to hastily leave the garden by the servants’ entrance, with the impression that she should never more enter that house which had been her home from childhood.
She glided stealthily for a few paces, until she reached an angle of the walk, upon which a shadow from the house fell darkly. As she entered the gloom hastily, she ran into the arms of a man who had been standing silently there, and whom she had not seen until she found herself pressed vigorously to his breast.
“My dear Miss Grahame, I have been expecting you, and I must have a few delicious words with you,” whispered the voice of Lester Vane in her ear.
“Monster!” she cried, affrightedly; and by a desperate exertion, she broke from him and fled--she knew not where.
He followed her swiftly, and caught her as she reached the thicket, in which he had felt convinced, on his first visit, she met a lover, clandestinely.
He seized her by both wrists, and held her firmly.
“It is useless to struggle with me,” he exclaimed, in an undertone. “You can scream for help, if you will, and bring hither your proud parents; I shall not quit my hold of you until I resign you into the custody of your father, who does not contemplate your departure, as he has just informed Lord Elsingham that you will join us in the drawing-room, when he would have the opportunity of further examining those fascinating attractions which he admired so much at dinner.”
“Unhand me,” she cried, with intense anguish, acutely feeling the painful position in which she stood, and how much the man whom she now hated with an intense loathing had become, for the moment, the master of the situation.
“When you have listened quietly to what I have to propose to you,” he answered, calmly.
“What can you have to propose to me, but insults?” she replied, impatiently.
“I do not offer them as such,” he answered, with a slight shrug of the shoulders; “if you will persist in so considering them, of course I cannot help it.”