“But in a nightmare one has no pain.  It is real and I must go somewhere,” she said, after the foot was moved.  Where could she go?  She had not looked at the place as she rode up.  She had only half-consciously seen the spinney.  Nigel was swearing at the horses.  Having got Childe Harold into the shed, there seemed to be nothing to fasten his bridle to.  And he had yet to bring his own horse in and secure him.  She must get away somewhere before the delay was over.

How dark it was growing!  Thank God for that again!  What was the rather high, dark object she could trace in the dimness near the hedge?  It was sharply pointed, is if it were a narrow tent.  Her heart began to beat like a drum as she recalled something.  It was the shape of the sort of wigwam structure made of hop poles, after they were taken from the fields.  If there was space between it and the hedge—­even a narrow space—­and she could crouch there?  Nigel was furious because Childe Harold was backing, plunging, and snorting dangerously.  She halted forward, shutting her teeth in her terrible pain.  She could scarcely see, and did not recognise that near the wigwam was a pile of hop poles laid on top of each other horizontally.  It was not quite as high as the hedge whose dark background prevented its being seen.  Only a few steps more.  No, she was awake—­in a nightmare one felt only terror, not pain.

“You, who died to-day,” she murmured.

She saw the horizontal poles too late.  One of them had rolled from its place and lay on the ground, and she trod on it, was thrown forward against the heap, and, in her blind effort to recover herself, slipped and fell into a narrow, grassed hollow behind it, clutching at the hedge.  The great French doctor had not been quite right.  For the first time in her life she felt herself sinking into bottomless darkness—­which was what happened to people when they fainted.

When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, because on one side of her rose the low mass of the hop poles, and on the other was the long-untrimmed hedge, which had thrown out a thick, sheltering growth and curved above her like a penthouse.  Was she awakening, after all?  No, because the pain was awakening with her, and she could hear, what seemed at first to be quite loud sounds.  She could not have been unconscious long, for she almost immediately recognised that they were the echo of a man’s hurried footsteps upon the bare wooden stairway, leading to the bedrooms in the empty house.  Having secured the horses, Nigel had returned to the cottage, and, finding her gone had rushed to the upper floor in search of her.  He was calling her name angrily, his voice resounding in the emptiness of the rooms.

“Betty; don’t play the fool with me!”

She cautiously drew herself further under cover, making sure that no end of her habit remained in sight.  The overgrowth of the hedge was her salvation.  If she had seen the spot by daylight, she would not have thought it a possible place of concealment.