Presently I remembered my duck-stone, and thought I would seek a case for it. I was alone in the house, for our one maid was gone marketing, and the governess not yet arrived. I went upstairs, and rummaged in my mother’s bureaux, and by and by found a tiny silver vinaigrette into which the stone fitted beautifully. Then I went and sat in our little front garden which overlooked the road running to the downs, and there rocked and mused amongst the flowers in a recovered temper. I hoped my father would fetch me again; I expected he would; and so, smiling and dreaming, put up the vinaigrette half-consciously, and sniffed at it. In a moment all sense of my surroundings went from me, and sky and flowers and the grey downs were blended in a rapture of unreality. I came to myself amidst an impression of jolting. I thought it was night, and that I was suffocating in my bedclothes. I threw something from my face, saw daylight, and cried out incoherently. Immediately the jerky motion ceased, and a horrible mask looked over and down at me. It was fat and sooty, with a handkerchief, startlingly white by contrast, going obliquely across its forehead. “Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it, I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved, perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized the opportunity to kidnap me. He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams, wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide! When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face twice, deliberately, on either side--not hard, but in a lustful, proprietary way. “Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured. “Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my turn.” “What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.