Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/25

Rh pulling up, and her lover dropping out of the carriage, and dodging among the horses and into the crowd.

"Tibs! Tibs!" she cried in her sudden, mocking excite- ment, standing high on the path in the sunlight and waving her bouquet. He, dodging with his hat in his hand, had not heard.

"Tibs!" she cried again, looking down to him.

He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her father standing on the path above him. A queer, startled look went over his face. He hesitated for a moment. Then he gathered himself together for the leap, to overtake her.

"Ah-h-h!" came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the reflex, she started, turned and fled, scudding with an unthinkable swift beating of her white feet and fraying of her white gar- ments, towards the church. Like a hound the young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging past her father, his supple haunches working like those of a hound that bears down on the quarry.

"Ay, after her!" cried the vulgar woman below, carried suddenly into the sport.

She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his supple, strong loins vanishing in pursuit.

Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst from the crowd at the gate. And then Ursula noticed again the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr. Crich, waiting suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face the flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round to look be- hind him, at the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at once came forward and joined him.

"We'll bring up the rear," said Birkin, a faint smile on his face.

"Ay!" replied the father laconically. And the two men turned together up the path.