Arrived at the house, she was loth to have him leave her for even the time required to take his horse to the stable.

“Come soon,” she said—­“come as quick as you can.  I shall be at the window.  Look up when you reach the gate.  Look at the window all the way from the gate to the door.”

In an instant, not even taking off her bonnet, she was sitting by the window waiting for him to appear.

A man approached, walking behind the hedge of lilacs which bordered the yard, and halted at the gate with an air of hesitation.  She turned ghastly white:  retribution was upon her.  It was Duvernois.

With that swift instinct of escape which sensitive and timorous creatures possess, she glided out of the room, through the upper hall, down a back stairway, into the garden behind the house, and so on to an orchard already obscure in the twilight.  Here she paused in her breathless flight, and burst into one of her frequent coughs, which she vainly attempted to smother.

“I was already dying,” she groaned.  “Ah, why could he not have given me time to finish?”

From the orchard she could faintly see the road, and she now discovered Leighton returning briskly toward the house.  Her first thought was, “He will look up at the window, and he will not see me!” Her next was, “They will meet, and all will be known!”

Under the sting of this last reflection she again ran onward until her breath failed.  She had no idea where she should go:  her only purpose was to fly from immediate exposure and scorn—­to fly both from the man she detested and the man she loved.  Her speed was quickened to the extent of her strength by the consideration that she was already missed, and would soon be pursued.

“Oh, don’t let them come!—­don’t let them find me!” she prayed to some invisible power, she could not have said what.

Mainly intent as she was upon mere present escape from reproachful eyes, she at times thought of lurking in the woods or in some neighboring village until Duvernois should disappear and leave her free to return to Leighton.  But always the reflection came up, “Now he knows that I have deceived him; now he will despise me and hate me, and refuse to see me; now I can never go back.”

In such stresses of extreme panic and anguish an adult is simply a child, with the same overweight of emotions and the same imperfections of reason.  During the moments when she was certain that Leighton would not forgive her, Alice made wild clutches at the hope that Duvernois might.  There were glimpses of the earlier days of her married life; cheering phantoms of the days when she believed that she loved and that she was beloved—­phantoms which swore by altars and bridal veils to secure her pardon.

She imagined Duvernois overtaking her with the words, “Alice, I forgive your madness:  do you also forgive the coldness which drove you to it?”

She imagined herself springing to him, reaching out her hands for reconciliation, putting up her mouth for a kiss, and sobbing, “Ah, why were you not always so?”