It was chilly now in the gloaming shade of the woods, and home seemed a long way off. After a mile or two the White Pony dragged as though his feet were sore, and when she tried to force him into a jarring canter the sharp corners of the Matthew Arnold book goaded cruelly against her breast.
"It isn't going to be a very pleasant ride," she said. "But it was quite an adventure. I don't know whether to call it the 'Adventure of the Runaway Road' or the 'Adventure of the Little Perfect Hour.'"
Then she shivered a little and tried to keep the White Pony in the rapidly fading sun spots of the Road, but the shadows grew thicker and cracklier and more lonesome every minute, and the only familiar sound of life to be heard was 'way off in the distance, where some little lost bossy was calling plaintively for its mother.
There were plenty of unfamiliar sounds, though. Things—nothing special, but just Things—sighed mournfully from behind a looming boulder. Something dark, with gleaming eyes, scudded madly through the woods. A ghastly, mawkish chill like tomb-air blew dankly from the swamp. Myriads of tiny insects droned venomously. The White Pony shied at a flash of heat lightning, and stumbled bunglingly on a rolling stone. Worst of all, far behind her, sounded the unmistakable tagging step of some stealthy creature.
For the first time in her life the girl was frightened—hideously, sickeningly frightened of Night!
Back in the open clearing round the tiny farmhouse, the light, of course, still lingered in a lulling yellow-gray. It would be an hour yet, she reasoned, before the great, black loneliness settled there. She could picture the little, simple, homely, companionable activities of early evening—the sputter of a candle, the good smell of a pipe, the steamy murmur of a boiling kettle. O—h! But could one go back wildly and say: "It is darker and cracklier than I supposed in the woods, and I am a wilful Girl, and there are fifteen wilful miles between me and home—and there is a cemetery on the way, and a new grave—and a squalid camp of gypsies—and a broken bridge—and I am afraid! What shall I do?"
She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village road below the hill.
Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a gap in the trees. "Drat Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I won't! I won't! I won't!"
All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a stranger in a strange land—no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no lover, no anything—and now just for a flash, just for one "little, perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that spoke her own language, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another woman!
She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "Nothing is mine forever. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING!" she sobbed.