“Catherine’s face was just like the landscape—shadows and sunshine flooding over it in rapid succession” (211). Edgar is slipping away rapidly and inevitably.
The Thursday meeting at the same spot—but now the fear is both evident and admitted.
And now we witness Heathcliff’s tactics. Heathcliff seems inured to tooth and nail, and he responds: that is what the British call “boxing the ears.”
“[Catherine’s] cousin had shrunk to a corner of the settle, as quiet as a mouse, congratulating himself, I daresay, at the correction have a lighted on another than him” (216).
Catherine recovers quickly, and attempt a different tactic: kneeling before Heathcliff and attempts love.
“Keep your eft’s fingers off; and, or I’ll kick you!” cried Heathcliff, brutally repulsing her. “I’d rather be hugged by a snake. How the devil can you dream of fawning on me? I detest you!” (219)
And why is that, especially, in her case?
Heathcliff would not have let Catherine go; she finally convinced Linton, and escapes through her mother’s window, climbing down a tree—an egress that we can assume her mother used as a girl to have a scamper about the moors.
The lawyer Green shows up finally. In Heathcliff’s pocket, he gives a quit order and fires all servants and hands save Nell: Heathcliff remembers her early kindnesses, and is in a sense loyal to those he considers friend.