There was a gasp from the interior.

"Ri-Ri, listen to me!" he demanded upon the threshold. "You're raving--loco--nuts! There's no harm in my huddling under the same roof with you--it's a d.a.m.n necessity. I'm not going to hold hands and I'm not going to kiss you. If you've got any drawn swords you can lay their blades between us. You turn your face to the wall and forget all about it and I'll do the same."

"Signor, stay without!"

"Got a dagger in your garter? . . . Ri-Ri, listen to me. You're absolutely wrong in the head. Be sensible. Have a heart. I'm going to get some rest."

"It does not matter what you say or what you intend. You do not need to rea.s.sure me that you will not kiss me, Signor. That will not happen again." Maria Angelina's voice was like ice. "But you are not coming within this place."

Tensely she confronted him. He loomed before her as a wolfish brute, seeking his comfort at this last cost of her pride. . . . But no man, she thought tragically, should ever say that he had spent the night within the same four walls.

She sprang forward, her hands outstretched, then shrank back.

She could not touch him. Not only the perception of the ludicrous folly of matching her strength against his withheld her, but some flaming fury against putting a hand upon a man who had so repudiated her.

Her brain grew alert. Suddenly very intent and collected she stepped aside and Johnny Byrd came in.

Close to the wall she pressed, edging nearer and nearer the door, and as he stumbled and fumbled with the blankets she gave a quick spring and flashed out.

Like mad she ran across the clearing, through a thicket, and out again and away.

On the instant he was after her; she heard his steps crashing behind her but she had the start of her swiftness and the speed of her desperation.

Brambles meant nothing to her, nor the thickets nor branches. She flew on and on, lost in the darkness, his shouts growing fainter and fainter in her ears.

At last, in a shrub, she stopped to listen. She could hear nothing. Then came a call--very faint. It came from the wrong direction. She had turned and doubled like a hare and Johnny was pursuing, if he still pursued, a mistaken way.

She was safe . . . and she stood still for a few minutes to quiet her pounding heart and catch her gasping breath, and then she stole out, cautiously, anxiously hurrying, to make her own way down.

She had no idea of time or of distance. Vaguely she felt that it was the middle of the night but that if she were quick, very quick, she might reach the Lodge before it was too disastrously late. She might meet a searching party out for them--there would be searching parties if people were truly worried at their absence.

Of course if they thought it an elopement, they might not take that trouble. They might be merely waiting and conjecturing.

If only Cousin Jim had not returned to New York! He was so kind and concerned that he would be searching. There would be a chance of his understanding. But Cousin Jane--what would she believe?

Cousin Jane had seen Johnny draw her significantly back.

At her folly of the afternoon she looked back with horror. How bold she had been in that new American freedom! Mamma had warned her--dear Mamma so far away, so innocent of this terrible disgrace. . . .

Wildly she plunged on through the dark, hoping always for a path but finding nothing but rough wilderness. She knew no landmarks to guide her, but down she went determinedly, down, down continually.

An hour had pa.s.sed. Perhaps two hours. The sky had grown blacker and blacker. There were occasional gusts of rain. The wind that had been threshing the tree tops blew with increasing fury.

Jagged tridents of lightning flashed before her eyes. Thunder followed almost instantly, great crashing peals that seemed to be rending the heavens.

Maria Angelina felt as if the splinters must fall upon her. It was like the voice of judgment.

On she went, down, down, through a darkness that was chaos lit by lightning. Rain came, in a torrent of water, heavy as lead, drenching her to the skin. Her hair had streamed loose and was plastered about her face, her throat, her arms. A strand like a wet rope wound about her wrist and delayed her. Often she slipped and fell.

Still down. But if she should find the Lodge, what then? What would they think of her, wet, torn, disheveled, an outcast of the night?

She sobbed aloud as she went. She, who had come to America so proudly, so confidently of glad fortune, who had thought the world a fairy tale and believed that she had found its prince--what place on earth would there be for her after this, disgraced and ashamed?

They would ship her back to Mamma at once. And the scandal would travel with her, whispered by tourists, blazoned by newspapers.

And her family had so counted upon her! They had looked for such great things!

Now she had utterly blackened their name, tarnished them all forever with her disrepute. Poor Julietta's hopes would be ruined. . . . No one would want a Santonini. . . . Lucia would be furious. The Tostis might even repudiate her--certainly they would inflict their condescension.

She could only disappear, hide in some nursing sisterhood.

So ran her wild thoughts as she scrambled down these endless mountain sides. All the black fears that she had fought off earlier in the evening by her belief in Johnny's devotion were upon her now like a pack of wolves. She wished that she could die at once and be out of it, yet when she heard the sudden wash of water, almost under her feet, she jumped aside and screamed.

A river! In the night it looked wider than that one they had followed that afternoon but it might only be another part of it.

Very wearily she made her way along the bank, so mortally tired that it seemed as if every step must be her last. There was no underbrush to struggle with now, for she had come to a grove of pines and their fallen needles made a carpet for her lagging feet.

The rain was nearly over, but she was too wet and too cold to take comfort in that.

More and more laggingly she went and at last, when a hidden root tripped her, she made no effort to rise, but lay prostrate, her cheek upon her outflung arm, and yielded to the dark, drowsy oblivion that stole numbingly over her.

She would be glad, she thought, never to wake.

CHAPTER IX

MRS. BLAIR REGRETS

It had taken a long time for concern to spread among the picnickers.

The sudden shower had sent them all scurrying for shelter, and when the climb was resumed, they crossed the river on those wide, flat stepping-stones that Johnny Byrd had missed, and re-formed in self-absorbed little twos and threes that failed to take note of the absence of the laggards.

When Ruth remembered to call back, "Where's Ri-Ri?" to her mother, Mrs.

Blair only glanced over her shoulder and answered, "She's coming," with no thought of anxiety.

It did occur to her, however, somewhat later, that the girl was loitering a little too significantly with young Byrd, and she made a point of suggesting to Ruth, when she pa.s.sed her in a short time, that she wait for her cousin who was probably finding the climb too strenuous.

"Who? Me?" said Ruth amazedly. "Gee, what do you want me to do--fan her?

Let Johnny do it," and cheerfully she went on photographing a group upon a fallen log, and Mrs. Blair went on with the lawyer from Washington who was a rapid walker.

And Ruth, with the casual thought that neither Ri-Ri nor Johnny Byrd would relish such attendance, promptly let the thought of them dissolve from her memory.

She was immersed in her own particular world that afternoon.

Life was at a crisis for her. Robert Martin had been drifting faster and faster with the current of his admiration for her, and now seemed to have been brought up on very definite solid ground. He felt he knew where he was. And he wanted to know where Ruth was.