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 sun-stroke 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 penknife, when the sound of a heavy footstep surprised me.

A brown harvest-hand, in straw hat and shirtsleeves, presently appeared.  He grinned when he saw me, and the thick snub of his nose would have seemed like a sneer at any other time.

“Are you the gentleman that got hurt?” he asked.  “Is it pretty tolerable bad?”

“Who said I was hurt?” I cried in astonishment.

“One of your town-women fro them hotel—­I reckon she was.  I was binding oats, in the field over the ridge; but I haven’t lost no time in comin’ here.”

While I was stupidly staring at this announcement, he whipped out a big clasp knife, and in a few minutes fashioned me a practicable crutch.  Then, taking me by the other arm, he set me in motion toward the village.