They were all running now, running with desperate speed down the long road, about the curves, on and on toward the frantic noise of the dog’s barking, and toward another noise, the sound of a human voice twisted and wild with agony.

The strange woman was crying out wildly; Cherry was sobbing a prayer.  Peter, without knowing that he spoke at all, was repeating over and over again the words:  “Not Alix-my God!—­it cannot be—­ she has never had an accident before-not Alix!”

A last curve, and they knew.  Over one of the sharpest and ugliest of the descending precipices, crashing down through the saplings and underbrush and striking the trunks of a score of trees on its way, the heavy car had fallen like a boulder.  And Peter saw that it was Alix’s car, and with a great cry he sprang over the bank and, slipping and stumbling, followed its mad course down almost to the dry creek-bed in the canyon, and fell on his knees beside the huddled figure that, erect and strong, in its striped blue gingham, had been Alix only a few short minutes ago.

She had been flung clear of the car, and although almost every bone in her body was broken, by some miracle the face, except for a deep cut where the brown hair met the tanned forehead, was untouched.  And as he caught her in his arms and bent over her with the bitterness of death stopping his own heart, a soft, thick braid loosened and fell like the touch of her hand upon his own, and it seemed to him that in the tranquil face and in the very look of the closed and fast-shadowing eyelids he caught a glimpse of Alix’s old smile.

Peter forgot everything else in the world.  He held her close to him and put his face against her face, and perhaps she had never so truly been his own as in this moment of their parting, when the quiet autumn woodland, shot with long shafts from the sinking sun, rang with his bitter cry: 

“No, Alix—­not dead!  My wife—­my wife!”

There were other men and women gathering fast now, and the whole little valley was beginning to ring with the tragedy.  After a while some sympathetic man touched Peter on the arm to say that Mrs. Lloyd had fainted, and that if he would please tell them what to do about the other man—­he was not yet dead—­

Peter roused himself, and with help from half a dozen hands on all sides he carried Alix up to the road and laid her upon a motor robe that some kindly spectator had spread in the deep dust.  Ah about he heard the quick, horrified breathing and muttering of the shocked and sympathetic neighbours who had gathered, but to him there was a brassy light in the world and a hideous taste of inky bitterness in the very air he breathed, and he recognized nobody.

Presently he was conscious that a small, slight woman with disorderly fair hair and with her face streaked with dust and tears was standing beside him, and looking down at her, he saw that it was Cherry.