Once more came the voice of Horatio, this time a little louder: "Is that you, my dear?"
"Of course it's me! How can you ask? Where are you, Horatio? What are you doing? Are you hurt? Why don't you speak?"
"I'm all right, my dear," was the faint yet cheerful response, "but I can't get out—the door's locked."
The door? What did he mean? A door out there in the open park?
Harriet was seized by a new terror. Horatio's mind was unhinged. He had always been eccentric, not a bit like other people—and now—now it had come!
In her sudden access of woe Harriet Merle did the nearest thing to fainting she knew. She sat down. That is to say, Harriet started to sit down. The invisible precipice at her feet and the law of gravitation did the rest.
As the curate's wife half slid, half rolled down the steep, grassy incline her ear, keyed to the highest pitch of dreadful expectancy, caught the sound of a scratching match. Lionel was striking a light.
"Wait, Lionel!" she screamed with all the breath she had to spare, and even as she did so her indecorous revolutions ceased gently on the level turf at the bottom of the incline.
In an instant she was on her feet and had shaken her disordered plumage into the hen-like seemliness befitting a curate's wife.
"Now strike a match, Lionel!" she called.