th which
she had chopped the wood. She raised her arm as though to throw
something--the sharp edge flashed past the lady's head as she hurried
away, and buried itself in the door-post with a crash.

CHAPTER V

They had hastened away with the child as though they were running away.
They had bundled it into the carriage--quick, quick--the coachman had
whipped up the horses, the wheels had turned round with a creaking
noise. The village in the Venn remained behind them, buried like a bad
dream one wants to forget.

A dull grey lay over the Venn. The sun, which had been shining in
the morning, had quite disappeared, as though not a single beam had
ever been seen there. The Venn mist, which rises so suddenly, was there
covering everything. There was a wall now where there had been a wide
outlook before. A wall not of stone and not of bricks, but much
stronger. It did not crack, it did not burst, it did not totter, it did
not give way before the hammer wielded by the strongest hand. It shaped
itself out of the morasses, powerful and impenetrable, and stretched
from the moor up to the clouds--or was it the clouds that had lowered
themselves to the earth?

The heavens and the Venn, both alike. Nothing but grey, a tough,
damp, cold, liquid and still firm, unfathomable, mysterious, awful
grey. A grey from which those who lose themselves on the moor never
find their way out. The mist is too tenacious. It has arms that grip,
that embrace so tightly, that one can neither see forward nor backward
any more, neither to the left nor to the right, that the cry
that wants to escape from a throat that is well-nigh choked with terror
is drowned, and that the eye becomes blind to every road, every
footprint.

The driver cursed and beat his horses. There was nothing more to be
seen of the road, nothing whatever, no ditch at the side of it, no
telegraph poles, no small rowan trees. The broad road that had been
made with such difficulty had disappeared in the grey that enfolded the
Venn. It was fortunate that the horses had not lost their way as yet.
They followed their noses, shook their long tails, neighed shrilly and
trotted courageously into the sea of mist.

Kate shuddered as she wrapped herself and the child up more tightly;
they required all the warm covering now which they had taken with them
so providently. Her husband packed her up still more securely, and then
laid his arm round her as though to protect her. It was a