ce in society! The question
of age, to be sure, remained unsettled; but all else was safe.

The next day I took a late and large breakfast, and sacrificed my
dinner. Before noon the guests had all straggled back to the hotel from
glen and grove and lane, so bright and hot was the sunshine. Indeed, I
could hardly have supported the reverberation of heat from the sides
of the ravine but for a fixed belief that I should be successful. While
crossing the narrow meadow upon which it opened, I caught a glimpse
of something white among the thickets higher up. A moment later it had
vanished, and I quickened my pace, feeling the beginning of an absurd
nervous excitement in my limbs. At the next turn, there it was again!
but only for another moment. I paused, exulting, and wiped my drenched
forehead. "She cannot escape me!" I murmured between the deep draughts
of cooler air I inhaled in the shadow of a rock.

A few hundred steps more brought me to the foot of the steep ascent,
where I had counted on overtaking her. I was too late for that, but the
dry, baked soil had surely been crumbled and dislodged, here and there,
by a rapid foot. I followed, in reckless haste, snatching at the laurel
branches right and left, and paying little heed to my footing. About,
one-third of the way up I slipped, fell, caught a bush which snapped
at the root, slid, whirled over, and before I fairly knew what had
happened, I was lying doubled up at the bottom of the slope.

I rose, made two steps forward, and then sat down with a groan of pain;
my left ankle was badly sprained, in addition to various minor scratches
and bruises. There was a revulsion of feeling, of course--instant,
complete, and hideous. I fairly hated the Unknown. "Fool that I was!" I
exclaimed, in the theatrical manner, dashing the palm of my hand softly
against my brow: "lured to this by the fair traitress! But, no!--not
fair: she shows the artfulness of faded, desperate spinsterhood; she is
all compact of enamel, 'liquid bloom of youth' and hair dye!"

There was a fierce comfort in this thought, but it couldn't help me out
of the scrape. I dared not sit still, lest a sunstroke should be added,
and there was no resource but to hop or crawl down the rugged path, in
the hope of finding a forked sapling from which I could extemporize
a crutch. With endless pain and trouble I reached a thicket, and was
feebly working on a branch with my pen-knife, when the sound of a heavy
footstep s