Jacqueline sheered into the middle of the dark gray road to avoid the patch of inky shadow that a solitary elm tree threw halfway across it. She wasn’t crying, as Caroline would have cried. Jacqueline cried, as you may have discovered, only when she was angry. Now her breath came thick and strangling, and her legs felt weak, and there were hot prickles of sweat on her temples, and cold prickles on the back of her neck. But she didn’t cry!
Some one was coming along the road behind her. No mistake! She could hear voices—men’s voices. On instinct she did what a moment before she couldn’t have been hired to do. She scuttled off the road and hid in the damp bed of the brook that bounded the Whitcomb acres. There she crouched with her head on her knees, until she heard steps shuffle along the culvert. She peeped up fearfully. Three figures of men were silhouetted against the sky. They paused on the side of the culvert (fortunately!) that was farthest from her, and spat into the brook, and spoke to one another in a foreign tongue, and laughed—ogreishly, as it seemed to Jacqueline—and then walked on.
They had actually gone. She could breathe again. But she wouldn’t dare walk on for hours and hours. They might loiter. She might overtake them.
For what seemed to her half the night, she crouched in the clammy bed of the brook. Oh, she thought to herself in those long, dreary minutes, what a silly she had been! Why hadn’t she stepped right up and told Cousin Penelope who she was? Well, she couldn’t, because she had gone and promised Caroline—a crazy promise—she hated herself because she had made it—she knew she was going to hate herself when she made it—just the same a promise was a promise, and you kept it, even though the sky fell.
But why had she ever promised? It would be dreadful at the farm now—but there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Perhaps Aunt Martha would send her to an Institution. She didn’t think any longer that an Institution would be fun. She thought of the workhouse boys in “Oliver Twist,” who never had enough to eat—and she hadn’t eaten herself now for ages and ages. She knew what hunger was! Oh, she didn’t want to go to an Institution—and she didn’t want to go to the farm—and she couldn’t go to the Gildersleeves’, because she had promised Caroline! Perhaps she’d better stay right there in the ditch and die—and then wouldn’t everybody be sorry!
Just then she heard something rustling near her. She didn’t stop to find out whether it was a harmless field mouse, or a snake, equally harmless, though perhaps less attractive. She didn’t stop for anything. She scrambled out of that ditch and started on a sore-footed run for the Conway farm. Aunt Martha—Neil—anything rather than the loneliness of the ditch upon a pitiless, black, Pole-infested night!
She was stumbling along the road, as she felt that she had been stumbling for a lifetime, panting and coughing as the dust that she kicked up got into her nose, when she heard from before her the chug and chatter of a laboring Ford. Nearer and clearer, she caught the gleam of headlights that lit up a fan-shaped space of dust and dark green onion tops.
For a second she halted in her tracks. Then she reflected that people in cars can be as undesirable as people on foot, and once more she plunged off the road. This time she found no friendly ditch to hide her. She just plumped down flat among the onion tops and lay gasping.
The Ford trundled past the spot where she had left the road—stopped—began to back. Jacqueline “froze,” like a scared little animal. Oh, why couldn’t she wake up, and find that this was just a horrible nightmare?
Some one leaned out of the Ford.