"Where did he go?"
"A-across there, most likely. Towards the fields. It's open fields. No, don't! Don't! Come back!"
The darkness was dense, the stinging-nettles a formidable brush. Striking still another match, he held it above his head. There was nothing else here except the unkempt grass and a decayed plum or two.
"Would you recognize him again?"
"No. I never even saw him. Please! Don't make a row! Take me home."
She was trembling badly now.
Holding her arm in his, he took her along the lane for some three hundred yards, to where faint white street-lamps glimmered in the Old Bath Road.
"I shall he all right now," she assured him. "No, don't come any farther. I don't want my father or mother to see you; and I don't want them to see me either; or heaven knows what they'd think. Good night. And thanks."
She was gone, running lightly and holding up the shoulder of her torn frock, before he had time to protest. He saw her turn in at a gate near by, with a quick look up and down the road. Then, more violently disturbed than ever before in his life, Phil Courtney retraced his steps.
Psychic fits, it seemed, had their uses after all. The episode had been so brief and rapid that he wondered whether he might have dreamed it. Stopping again at the place where he had found Ann, which he had' marked by a wooden back gate with a white enameled sign reading, "No hawkers or circulars," he struck matches to see whether any traces might have been left."