“She begged so hard to go out, and said the pain was quite well,” gasped Mrs. Ewing, “that I said she might go and see Annie, and here it is ten o’clock at night, and Tom has gone to Grover’s Corner, and may not be home until morning, and Aaron is with him, and I had no one to send.  I thought I would not say anything to you.  I thought every minute she would come in, and Emma has walked half a mile looking for her, and I am horribly worried.”

“I will go directly and look for her,” said James.  “I will put the bay in the light buggy, and drive to Westover.  Don’t worry.  I’ll bring her back in half an hour.”

“The bay is so lame she can’t travel, I heard Tom say this morning,” said Mrs. Ewing.

“Then I’ll take the gray.”

“She balks, you know.”

James laughed.  “Oh, I’ll risk the balking,” he said.

He hurried out to the stable and put the gray in the buggy.  It was a very short time before James was on the road, and the gray went as well as could be desired, but just before she reached Westover she stopped short, and James might as well have tried to move a mountain as that animal with her legs planted at four angles of relentless obstinacy.

CHAPTER V

James had considerable experience with, horses.  He knew at once that it was probably a hopeless undertaking to change the mare’s mind, or rather her obstinacy.  However, he tried the usual methods, touching with the whip, getting out and attempting to lead, but they were all, as he had supposed from the first, in vain.  A terrible sense of being up against fate itself seized him:  an animal’s will unreasoning, unrelenting, bears, in fact, the aspect of fate itself.  It is at once sensate and insensate.  James thought of Clemency, and decided to waste no more time.

The gray mare was near enough to a tree to tie her, and he tied her and set out on foot.  It was a very dark night, cloudy and chilly and threatening snow.  He walked on, as it were, through softly enveloping shadows, which seemed to his excited fancy to be coming forward to meet him.  He began to be very much alarmed.  He had wasted most of his young sentiment upon Clemency’s mother, but, after all, he suddenly discovered that he had a feeling for the girl herself.  He thought that it was only the natural anxiety of any man of honor for the safety of a helpless young girl out alone at night, and beset by possible dangers, but he realized himself in a panic.  His plan was of course to go directly to Annie Lipton’s home, some two miles farther on, then it occurred to him that Clemency must inevitably have left there.  If she were lying dead or injured on the road, how in the world was he to see?  He felt in his pocket for matches, and found just one.  He lit that and peered around.  While it burned he saw nothing except the frozen road with its desolate borders of woods and brush, a fit scene for countless