"Well, and if he did?" cries Linley, impatiently. "It _is_ very late," she says, looking round into the dusk; "it must be, by the light. I never noticed how dark it has grown since you overtook me." "It is no darker than it was before Gerard passed us," he answers, rather nettled. "No, but--" "Why, how scared you look!" he interrupts her. "You don't mean to say you are _afraid_ of him?" (incredulously.) "If I were you, I don't think I should pay much deference to the opinion of a person who, as you say, never has the civility even to speak to you." She is silent. "It is the authority of his eye that awes you, I suppose?" says the young man, vexed and sneering:-- "'An eye like Mars', to threaten and command.' "_Threaten!_ Yes--I can testify to that!" Hearing his words, Esther recovers her self-possession, and speaks with some dignity: "You are quite wrong. Mr. Gerard's opinion has no influence whatever on my sayings or doings; it would be very ridiculous if it had. It was merely that his look of surprise reminded me of what I ought to have recollected without reminding, that I _should_ have been home an hour ago." "Wanted again, I suppose?" says the young man, with the air of an aggrieved person. "I wish you were not in quite such request; you are always being wanted." "There is a stile close here," says Esther, evidently in a hurry to be off; "if I cross it, and make a short-cut across the park, I shall be home twenty minutes sooner than if I went by the road. Good-bye." "Good-bye," he says, reluctantly. "I'm not a bloodthirsty fellow generally, but I wish that Gerard had broken his neck over that bullfinch that he came to grief over to-day, before he had come poking his ugly nose here, where nobody wanted him; at least I did not, and, to judge by your face, neither did you. Well! when are we to meet again, I wonder?" "Never!--some time or other--soon!" answers Esther, hastily and contradictorily, running up the gamut of adverbs in search of the one most likely to obtain her release. Having gained that object, she jumps over the stile, and disappears into a sea of mist. Meanwhile St. John, having arrived at Blessington, and given up his horse to a groom, enters the house; but the confinement of roof and walls is insupportable to him. So he goes out again, and, walking up the avenue, stations himself at the gate. There, resting his arms on the topmost bar, he stands, straining his eyes down the road by which he expects to see Esther and her companion make their appearance. "They will defer their parting to the last moment--that is of course," he says to himself, in his lonely pain. "Well," taking out his watch and minuting them, in order to drink the cup of his jealous misery to the dregs, "it is not more than a mile and a half from here to the place where I passed them; let us see how long a time they will manage to be in doing the distance."