nd prevented its being seen. Only a few steps
more. No, she was awake--in a nightmare one felt only terror, not pain.

"YOU, WHO DIED TO-DAY," she murmured.

She saw the horizontal poles too late. One of them had rolled from its
place and lay on the ground, and she trod on it, was thrown forward
against the heap, and, in her blind effort to recover herself, slipped
and fell into a narrow, grassed hollow behind it, clutching at the
hedge. The great French doctor had not been quite right. For the
first time in her life she felt herself sinking into bottomless
darkness--which was what happened to people when they fainted.

When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, because on one side
of her rose the low mass of the hop poles, and on the other was the
long-untrimmed hedge, which had thrown out a thick, sheltering growth
and curved above her like a penthouse. Was she awakening, after all? No,
because the pain was awakening with her, and she could hear, what seemed
at first to be quite loud sounds. She could not have been unconscious
long, for she almost immediately recognised that they were the echo of
a man's hurried footsteps upon the bare wooden stairway, leading to
the bedrooms in the empty house. Having secured the horses, Nigel had
returned to the cottage, and, finding her gone had rushed to the upper
floor in search of her. He was calling her name angrily, his voice
resounding in the emptiness of the rooms.

"Betty; don't play the fool with me!"

She cautiously drew herself further under cover, making sure that no
end of her habit remained in sight. The overgrowth of the hedge was
her salvation. If she had seen the spot by daylight, she would not have
thought it a possible place of concealment.

Once she had read an account of a woman's frantic flight from a murderer
who was hunting her to her death, while she slipped from one poor hiding
place to another, sometimes crouching behind walls or bushes, sometimes
lying flat in long grass, once wading waist-deep through a stream, and
at last finding a miserable little fastness, where she hid shivering for
hours, until her enemy gave up his search. One never felt the reality of
such histories, but there was actually a sort of parallel in this. Mad
and crude things were let loose, and the world of ordinary life seemed
thousands of miles away.

She held her breath, for he was leaving the house by the front door. She
heard his footsteps on the bricked path, and th