With the last fierce words she moved away. I would have said something, I could almost have found it in my heart to stop her and make her hear. Nay, I had dreadful thoughts; for I was the stronger, and I might have done with her as I pleased. But she swept by me so fearlessly--as I might pass some loathsome cripple in the road--that I stood turned to stone. Without looking at me--without turning her head to see whether I followed or remained, or what I did--she went steadily down the track until the trees and the shadow and the growing darkness hid her grey figure from me; and I found myself alone.
And full of black rage! Had she only reproached me, or, turning on me in the hour of _my_ victory, said all she had now said in the moment of her own, I could have borne it. She might have shamed me then, and I might have taken the shame to myself, and forgiven her. But, as it was, I stood there in the gathering dusk, between the darkening hedges, baffled, tricked, defeated! And by a woman! She had pitted her wits against mine, her woman's will against my experience, and she had come off the victor. And then she had reviled me. As I took it all in, and began to comprehend, also, the more remote results, and how completely her move had made further progress on my part impossible, I hated her. She had tricked me with her gracious ways and her slow-coming smile. And, after all--for what she had said--it was this man's life or mine. What had I done that another man would not do? _Mon Dieu!_ In the future there was nothing I would not do. I would make her smart for those words of hers! I would bring her to her knees!
Still, hot as I was, an hour might have restored me to coolness. But when I started to return, I fell into a fresh rage, for I remembered that I did not know my way out of the maze of rides and paths into which she had drawn me; and this and the mishaps which followed kept my rage hot. For a full hour I wandered in the wood, unable, though I knew where the village lay, to find any track which led continuously in one direction. Whenever, at the end of each attempt, the thicket brought me up short, I fancied I heard her laughing on the farther side of the brake; and the ignominy of this chance punishment, the check which the confinement placed on my rage, almost maddened me. In the darkness, I fell, and rose cursing; I tore my hands with thorns; I stained my suit, which had suffered sadly once before. At length, when I had almost resigned myself to lie in the wood, I caught sight of the lights of the village, and trembling between haste and anger, pressed towards them. In a few minutes I stood in the little street.