It all came—a multitude of impressions—crowded into a few brief seconds; yet every racing detail was engraved with awful distinctness upon the girl's mind, never to be forgotten.
She struggled wildly in that suffocating hold, struggled fruitlessly to lift her face from her husband's shoulder into which it was ruthlessly pressed, and only ceased to struggle when the end of that terrible flight came with a jolt and a jar and a final, sickening crash that flung her headlong into a dreadful gulf of emptiness into which no light or echo of sound could even vaguely penetrate.
CHAPTER II
Nan opened her eyes in her own sunny bedroom, and gazed wonderingly about her, dimly conscious of something wrong.
The doctor, whom she had known from her earliest infancy, was bending over her, and she smiled her recognition of him, though with a dawning uneasiness. Vague shapes were floating in her brain that troubled and perplexed her.
"What happened?" she murmured uneasily.
He laid his hand upon her forehead.
"Nothing much," he told her gently. "Lie still like a good girl and go to sleep. There is nothing whatever for you to worry about. You'll be better in the morning."
But the shapes were obstinate, and would not be expelled. They were, moreover, beginning to take definite form.