“Come!  Come!” cried the old woman, beating her hands on Marise’s arm.  “Perhaps it ain’t too late.  Perhaps you can do something.”

“What has happened?” asked Marise, making her voice sharp and imperative to pierce the other’s agitation.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know,” sobbed Agnes.  “She didn’t come down for breakfast.  I went up to see . . . oh, go quick!  Go quick!”

She went down, half on the bench, half on the ground.

Marise and Marsh stood for an instant, petrified.

There was only the smallest part of Marise’s consciousness which was alive to this.  Most of it lay numbed and bewildered, still hearing, like a roll of thunder, the voice of Vincent Marsh.

Then she turned.  “Look out for her, will you,” she said briefly.  “No, don’t come with me.  I’ll go by the back road.  It’s the quickest, but it’s too narrow for a car.  You drive to Ashley and bring the doctor in your car.”

She ran down the path and around the house to the road, not feeling the blinding heat of the sun.  She ran along the dusty road, a few steps from the house before the turn into the narrow lane.  She felt nothing at all but a great need for haste.

As she ran, putting all her strength into her running, there were moments when she forgot why she was hurrying, where she was going, what had happened; but she did not slacken her pace.  She was on the narrow back road now, in the dense shade of the pines below the Eagle Rocks.  In five minutes she would be at Cousin Hetty’s.  That was where she was going.

She was running more slowly now over the rough, uneven, stony road, and she was aware, more than of anything else, of a pain in her chest where she could not draw a long breath.  It seemed to her that she must be now wholly in the bad dream, for she had the nightmare sensation of running with all her strength and not advancing at all.  The somber, thick-set pines seemed to be implacably in the same place, no matter how she tried to pass them, to leave them behind, to hurry on.  Everything else in the silent, breathless, midsummer forest was rooted immovably deep in the earth.  She alone was killing herself with haste, and yet futilely . . . not able to get forward, not able to . . .

* * * * *

And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and showed her another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right, running down the steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks.  A man running as she had been wishing she could run, a powerful, roughly dressed man, rapt in a passion of headlong flight, that cast him down the rough slope, over the rocks, through the brambles, as though his flight were part of an endless fall.

Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but the age-old woman’s instinct of fear and concealment.

The man plunged forward, not seeing her where she stood on the road across which he now burst, flinging himself out of the pines on one side and into the thicket of undergrowth on the other.