she distinctly heard a noise up-stairs, and then a shadow
crossed the ceiling. A new horror seized her--a horror of herself.
She felt that in another moment she might herself become a very part
and substance of the fear that was oppressing her. She had an
imagination of jumping up, of running about and screaming, of
breaking something. Then with that clutch at life and reason which is
life itself, which all dying and despairing things have at the last,
she thought again that there must be somebody, somebody in the whole
place to whom she could turn, somebody who would help her, who would
pity her. She had heretofore only thought of the possibility of
somebody who would come and stay with her; it now occurred to her
that she herself might be the one to go, and that she might escape
from this house of fear. It was suddenly to her as to a prisoner who
realizes that all the time his prison doors have been unbarred.

"What am I staying here for in this awful house by myself?" she
suddenly thought. When that idea came to her, the idea of escape, the
action of her mind became involuntary. There was only one to whom she
could run for aid. She remembered so vividly that the experience
seemed to repeat itself, her terror of the tramp in the woods, and
how she had seen Anderson. She sprang up. It became sure to her that
she must get away from that house, that she must not remain. The
imaginative girl, whom anxiety and want of food had weakened, as well
as fear, was fairly at the point of madness, or that hysteria which
is the border-land of it. She distinctly heard herself laugh as she
ran out of the room and out of the house. Her head was bare, but she
did not think of that. She had on her coat which she had worn because
of the coldness of the house. She fled across the lawn to the street.
Once on the road, she was saner, she felt only the natural impulse of
flight of any hunted thing. She fled down the road past the quiet
village houses, in which the people slept in their beds. The electric
lights were out, the moon was low. It was quite dark. Nobody except
herself was abroad in the night. A great pity for herself, a pity
that she might have felt for a little lonely child out by herself at
night, when everybody else was safe in their homes, came over her.
She sobbed as she ran; she even sobbed quite loudly. She did not feel
so afraid, as wild for somebody to take her in and comfort her. She
ran down the main street and turned up