The man, when he had stood up, it seemed to Charlotte, looked directly at her.  She was always sure that he did.  But if he did, it was with unseeing eyes.  His brain did not compass the image of her sitting there, leaning against the tree, a creature of incarnate terror and insane fury.  He seemed to keep his eyes fixed upon her for a full second.  Charlotte’s nerves and muscles were tense with the restrained impulse to spring.  Then he slowly shuffled away.  As he passed, the squirrel slid like swiftness itself down the tree, and across an open space to another.  The girl sank limply upon herself in a dead faint, and the tramp gained the road and trudged sullenly on towards Ludbury.

When Charlotte came to herself she was still sitting there limply.  She could not realize all at once what had happened.  Then she remembered.  She looked at the place where the tramp had lain, and so forcibly did her terrified fancy project images that it was difficult to convince herself that he was really gone.  She seemed to still see that gross thing lying there.  Then she remembered distinctly that he had gone.

She got up, but she could scarcely stand.  She had never fainted before, and she wondered at her own sensations.  “What ails me?” she thought.  She strained her eyes around, but there was no sign of the terrible man.  She was quite sure that he had gone, and yet how could she be sure?  He might have gone out to the road and be sitting beside it.  A vivid recollection of tramps sitting beside that very road, as she had been driving past, came over her.  She became quite positive that he was out on the road, and a terror of the road was over her.  She looked behind her, and the sunny gleam of an open field came through the trees.  The field was shaggy with blue asters and golden-rod gone to seed, and white tufts of immortelles.  Charlotte stared through the trees at the field, and suddenly a man crossed the little sunny opening.  A great joy swept over her; he was Randolph Anderson.  Now she was sure that she was safe.  She stumbled again to her feet, and ran weakly out of the oak grove.  There was a low fence between the grove and the field, and when she reached that she stopped.  She felt this to be insurmountable for her trembling limbs.  “Oh, dear!” she said, aloud, and although the man was holding his butterfly-net cautiously over the top of a clump of asters so far away that it did not seem possible that he could hear her, he immediately looked up.  Then he hastened towards her.  As he drew near a look of concern deepened on his face.  He had had an inkling at the first glimpse of her that something was wrong.  He reached the fence and stood looking at her on the other side.

“I am afraid I can’t get over,” Charlotte said, faintly.  She never knew quite how she was over, lifted in some fashion, and Anderson stood close to her, looking at her with his face as white as hers.

“What is it?” he asked.  “Are you ill, Miss Carroll?  What is it?”