e, as he walked
leisurely along, but she could not see him. The way was mostly between
hedges until it reached the common: there she would catch sight of him,
for, notwithstanding the gauzy mist, the moon gave plenty of light. On
she went swiftly, still fancying at intervals she heard in front of her
his whistle, and even his step on the hard, frozen path. In her eager
anxiety to overtake him, she felt neither the chilling air nor the fear
of the night and the loneliness. Dismay was behind her, and hope before
her. On and on she ran. But when, with now failing breath, she reached
the common, and saw it lie so bare and wide in the moonlight, with the
little hut standing on its edge, like a ghastly lodge to nowhere, with
gaping black holes for door and window, then, indeed, the horror of her
deserted condition and the terrors of the night began to crush their
way into her soul. What might not be lurking in that ruin, ready to
wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing girl, start out
in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now streamed behind her! And
there was the hawthorn, so old and grotesquely contorted, always
bringing to her mind a frightful German print at the head of a poem
called "The Haunted Heath," in one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It
was like an old miser, decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run!
Miserable as was her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable
by these terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which
the moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a shippen,
and a certain strange sound, coming again and again, which she could
not account for, all turned to things unnatural, therefore frightful.
Faintly, once or twice, she tried to persuade herself that it was only
a horrible dream, from which she would wake in safety; but it would not
do; it was, alas! all too real--hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or
fact, there was no turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful
than all possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old
house she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room
inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon!
Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into the
shadow of the hedges.

There seems to be a hope as well as a courage born of despair:
immortal, yet inconstant children of a death-doomed sire, both were now
departing. If Tom had come this way, she must, she