hoebe dropped her basket and her face grew very pale before the horrors
thus coarsely spread before her. She staggered and felt sick at the
man's last speech. Then, with one great sob of breath, she turned her
back on him, nerved herself to use her shaking legs, and set off at her
best speed, as one running from some dangerous beast of the field.

Grimbal made no attempt to follow, but watched her fade into the mist,
then turned and pursued his way through the dripping woodlands. Sunrise
fires gleamed along the upper layers of the fading vapours and gilded
autumn's handiwork. Ripe seeds fell tapping through the gold of the
horse-chestnuts, and many acorns also pattered down upon a growing
carpet of leaves. Webs and gossamers twinkled in the sunlight, and the
flaming foliage made a pageant of colour through waning mists where red
leaves and yellow fell at every breath along the thinning woods. Beneath
trees and hedgerows the ripe mosses gleamed, and coral and amber fungi,
with amanita and other hooded folk. In companies and clusters they
sprang or arose misshapen, sinister, and alone. Some were orange and
orange-tawny; others white and purple; not a few peered forth livid,
blotched, and speckled, as with venom spattered from some reptile's
jaws. On the wreck of the year they flourished, sucked strange life from
rotten stick and hollow tree, opened gills on lofty branch and bough,
shone in the green grass rings of the meadows, thrust cup and cowl from
the concourse of the dead leaves in ditches, clustered like the uprising
roof-trees of a fairy village in dingle and in dene.

At the edge of the woods John Grimbal stood, and the hour was very dark
for him and he cursed at the loss of his manhood. His heart turned to
gall before the thought of the thing he had done, as he blankly
marvelled what unsuspected base instinct had thus disgraced him. He had
plumbed a possibility unknown within his own character, and before his
shattered self-respect he stood half passionate, half amazed. Chance had
thus wrecked him; an impulse had altered the whole face of the problem;
and he gritted his teeth as he thought of Blanchard's feelings when
Phoebe should tell her story. As for her, she at least had respected him
during the past years; but what must henceforth be her estimate of him?
He heaped bitter contempt upon himself for this brutality to a woman; he
raged, as he pursued long chains of consequences begot of this single
lapse of sel