fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay
under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying
lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in
the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and
sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts,
would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear,
above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the
undergrowth: a breaking twig, a brushing sound, as of a furtive
footstep--and she would say, "A man.... I must save Maurice."

The yellow flame of the lantern was burning white in the dawn, as,
holding back against the weight of the wagon--the palms of her bleeding
hands clenched on the shafts, her feet slipping, her ankles twisted and
wrenched--by and by, with the tears of physical suffering streaming down
her face, she reached the foot of the mountain. The, thin, cool air of
morning flowed about her in crystalline stillness; suddenly the sun
tipped the green bowl of the world, and all at once shadows fell across
the road like bars. They seemed to her, in her daze of terror and
exhaustion, insurmountable: the road was level now, but she pulled and
pulled, agonizingly, over those bars of nothingness; then one wheel sank
into a rut, and the wagon came to a dead standstill; but at the same
moment she saw ahead of her, among the trees, Doctor Bennett's dark,
sleeping house. So, dropping the shafts, she went stumbling and running,
to pound on the door, and gasp out:

"Come--help--Maurice--come--"

* * * * *

"I think," she said afterward, lying like a broken thing upon her bed,