CHAPTER VI.

Richard Dalrymple spent a restless night, and counted the minutes almost until it was time to meet his _fiancée_ at Granton Falls.

He had some difficulty in evading his friends, but finally managed to be at the place of rendezvous some twenty minutes before the time fixed.

The place appointed was the corner of a stone bridge which spanned the Eildon river at Granton Falls, the said falls being simply a succession of small rapids.

As Richard looked over the bridge he noticed the footpath about fifty feet lower than the bridge, and said with some anxiety: “I hope Jeannie did not mean the footpath at the falls, for if she goes there while I am here I can’t get to her without breaking my neck over those rocks.”

At that instant the sharp ring of a horse’s hoofs on the hard granite road aroused his attention, and turning round slowly, to his utter bewilderment, he saw Miss Beattison, unattended by her groom, reining in her horse by his side.

“How do you do, Doctor Dalrymple? Will you please help me to dismount, I have something to say to you.”

Then she tied her horse to the nearest sapling, and came to his side; her face white and almost stern in its set expression.

“Are you wondering how I came to be here? Well I came by the same train as you did, to find out for myself whether the secret of your indifference to me was to be found here, in this little country town; and if it was the case, dear, as I had heard that you loved another, why, then, I determined I should end my most miserable life, for to me death is a thousand times better than life without you. Please do not think ill of me, for, as Heaven is my witness, this unrequited love is more than I can bear. This lonely walk what does it mean? Are you waiting now to keep some appointment?”

As Gwendoline Beattison stood before Richard Dalrymple in all the pride of her splendid beauty, pleading the cause of her own desperate heart, his brain reeled before this fresh temptation. Did the struggle of all these long months and the resolution displayed in his flight count for nothing? Had he come all these long four hundred miles only to capitulate here? Perish the thought, and yet his breath came fast and faster as he gazed upon her, and his eyes faltered and fell before the terrible battery of hers. He held up his hands, palm outward, as a drowning man who finds the current too strong for him, and murmured, “Leave me. For God’s sake go away and leave me.”

That is what he meant to say--and perhaps it is what he did say--but every sense he had was surrendering to the irresistible usurper, and he could not be sure that even his speech was not betraying him.

He tried to think of Jeannie, but his very soul shook as if there, too, in the very holy of holies of his heart, a traitor was offering capitulation on the conqueror’s own terms.

Every glance was a temptation to the stricken man as Gwendoline Beattison stood before him. Her closely fitting habit revealed every throb of the over-charged bosom and told all too plainly the tempest which was convulsing it. His own heart bounded madly in response, every fibre of his powerful frame thrilled in sympathy with the passion which shook the voluptuous figure before him, and his eyes no longer sought the ground but, alas!--_bon gré mal gré_--soon outdid hers in their fiery candor.

Words failed them both. It was the silence of the duel when the smallest flash of the blade may mean a life. As deadly was their silence and as vital, but their eyes--ah, their eyes spoke with a measureless volume and thrill, which deadened their ears to every earthly sound.

“Oh, why can’t you love me, dear? am I so unattractive that you must run away from me?”

As Gwendoline Beattison said this, a wonderfully soft and pathetic look came into her beautiful eyes, and, as if unable longer to control herself, she placed her two trembling hands on Richard Dalrymple’s shoulders.

“Why is it, dear--won’t you tell me?” and the voice which had been shaken by passion became strangely gentle and tender as the straying hands growing bolder stole around his neck and her beating heart in dire proximity fired his own anew.

Oh, Jeannie Farquharson why do you not hurry to the relief of your faltering lover, true to you so long in the face of a desperate temptation, but now, alas, in the toils!

Too late! the perfume which surrounded the fair temptress like an atmosphere was in his nostrils, the intoxication of her gaze mounted to his brain; her touch thrilled him to his finger-tips, his very soul tottered on its throne, and in another instant their lips met in a long clinging kiss--a kiss never to be undone, never to be forgotten, the kiss of a lifetime after which man and woman ought to die eternally, since in its rapture they have beggared Paradise!

The long ecstatic kiss ended at last, the tumultuously beating feminine heart grew still, the living, throbbing being in Richard Dalrymple’s arms became a dead weight, and Gwendoline Beattison sank back insensible, a victim to her own uncontrollable emotion.

“Oh, Dick, Dick, where are you? I saw you a minute ago.”

Such was the cry--all too late--which, welcome beyond words a few minutes ago, now sounded like the knell of doom in Richard Dalrymple’s ears.

Placing Miss Beattison’s inanimate form gently against a mossy knoll our perturbed hero presented himself over the wall of foliage and called to his lady-love, “Oh wait there, I will be with you in a minute.”

“No, stay where you are,” came back the silvery response; “you can’t come down, I will cross the river on the stepping stones and come to you.”

“Oh, but this is awful,” muttered Richard under his breath, “Jeannie will be here in three minutes and will find Miss Beattison, and how on earth can I explain things?”

Then he turned his attention to Miss Beattison, who was slowly regaining consciousness. “Are you feeling better?” he began with a wonderful softness and shamefacedness in eye and tone, when suddenly a piercing scream made him leap to his feet and run to the other side of the bridge.

“My God! Jeannie has fallen in and been swept over the rapids.”

Then he sped like a deer across the bridge, down the sloping bank at the further side and past the rushing rapids to the whirling pool where poor Jeannie, still partially buoyed up by her clothes, was whirling around in the grasp of the fatal current.