it
with a shudder. For all the response she had found she might have
touched a dead man. Something of the look of a dead man, too, was in the
boy's face and eyes as he bent forward, motionless as a statue, his
features like stone and his eyes as unhuman as polished agate, staring
fixedly at the road before them.

A low-bending, ice-covered branch whipped her face and she shrieked,
fancying it the touch of dead fingers. Several times huge shapes from
the roadside seemed to spring at them, but their progress was too swift
even for spectral shapes. Or was it?

It was on a stretch of road through the woods that the obsession in her
mind took its final and most hideous form. Close behind them, and
ringing in their ears, she fancied she heard a cry in the voice of Shaw.
It was not Shaw's human voice. She would not have known it in a human
world. It had passed through the great change; but it was recognizable,
because she, too, had passed through some great change. Recognizable,
too, was the sound of Shaw's running feet, though she had never heard
them run, and though they were running so lightly on the top of the
snow.

He was just behind them, she thought. If she turned she knew she would
see him, not as she had known him, plump, sleek, living and loathsome,
but stark, rigid, and ready for his grave, yet able to pursue; and the
new, unearthly light of his bulging eyes seemed burning into her back.

She groaned, but the groan brought no response from the tense figure
beside her. The only sounds were the howls of the wind, the frenzied
protests of the tortured trees, and the fancied hail of a dead man,
coming closer and closer.

CHAPTER XVII

LAURIE MAKES A CONFESSION

The lights of Long Island City greeted them with reassuring winks
through the snow. Seeing these, Doris drew a deep breath. She had let
her nerves run away with her, she subconsciously felt. Now, rising from
the depths of her panic to a realization of contact with a living world,
as they crossed the bridge to Manhattan, seeing hurrying men and women
about her, hearing the blasts of motor horns and the voices of motor
drivers, she fiercely assured herself that she had been an hysterical
fool.

In the first moments of reaction she even experienced a sense of
personal injury and almost of resentment toward her companion. He had
put her through the most horrible half-hour of her life. It seemed that
no service he had rendered could compensate her