"Oh!" cried Grace, in her fright.
"You are in my arms, dearest," said Fitzpiers, "and I am going to claim
you, and keep you there all our two lives!"
She rested on him like one utterly mastered, and it was several seconds
before she recovered from this helplessness. Subdued screams and
struggles, audible from neighboring brakes, revealed that there had
been other lurkers thereabout for a similar purpose. Grace, unlike
most of these companions of hers, instead of gasping and writhing, said
in a trembling voice, "Mr. Fitzpiers, will you let me go?"
"Certainly," he said, laughing; "as soon as you have recovered."
She waited another few moments, then quietly and firmly pushed him
aside, and glided on her path, the moon whitening her hot blush away.
But it had been enough--new relations between them had begun.
The case of the other girls was different, as has been said. They
wrestled and tittered, only escaping after a desperate struggle.
Fitzpiers could hear these enactments still going on after Grace had
left him, and he remained on the spot where he had caught her,
Winterborne having gone away. On a sudden another girl came bounding
down the same descent that had been followed by Grace--a fine-framed
young woman with naked arms. Seeing Fitzpiers standing there, she
said, with playful effrontery, "May'st kiss me if 'canst catch me, Tim!"
Fitzpiers recognized her as Suke Damson, a hoydenish damsel of the
hamlet, who was plainly mistaking him for her lover. He was
impulsively disposed to profit by her error, and as soon as she began
racing away he started in pursuit.
On she went under the boughs, now in light, now in shade, looking over
her shoulder at him every few moments and kissing her hand; but so
cunningly dodging about among the trees and moon-shades that she never
allowed him to get dangerously near her. Thus they ran and doubled,
Fitzpiers warming with the chase, till the sound of their companions
had quite died away. He began to lose hope of ever overtaking her,
when all at once, by way of encouragement, she turned to a fence in
which there was a stile and leaped over it. Outside the scene was a
changed one--a meadow, where the half-made hay lay about in heaps, in
the uninterrupted shine of the now high moon.
Fitzpiers saw in a moment that, having taken to open ground, she had
placed herself at his mercy, and he promptly vaulted over after her.
She flitted a little way down the mead, when all at once her light form
disappeared as if it had sunk into the earth. She had buried herself in
one of the hay-cocks.