"What is the matter?" she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out
of his face.

He laughed. "Oh, merely that we're lost. But we will wait here till that
girl chooses to come back for us. Only it's getting late, and Mr.
Gerald--"

"Why, I know the way down," she said, and started quickly in a direction
which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had
emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his
memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for
guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed
a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some
mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.

They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the
last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the
church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and
wait for them there.

"Does no one at all live here?" Lanfear asked, carelessly.

"Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a
lemonade! My mother," she went on, with a natural pride in the event,
"was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast,
and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away." She vividly
dramatized the fact. "I was alive, but she was dead."

"Tell her," Miss Gerald said, "that my mother is dead, too."