Neva did not wait for the sentence to be finished.
With a furtive glance she had seen that the door was ajar, and that no one was yet in the ante-chamber; and so, suddenly, with a dart like that of a lapwing, she flew past Mrs. Black, sprang into the outer room, and locked the door upon her utterly amazed and stupefied enemy.
Then she sped across the floor of the ante-room and peeped into the hall.
The upper and lower halls and the stair-way were alike deserted. By some strange fatality, or providence, not one of the household was within sight.
Neva fled down the stair-way with the speed and lightness of an antelope. The front door was ajar. She pulled it open and darted out upon the lawn, and sped away amid the gloom of the trees. And as she thus fled, the loud shrieks of Mrs. Black rang through the house, rousing Mr. Black in the dining-room, Mrs. Artress and Celeste, and even the women in the kitchen.
In seemed less than a minute to Neva, when she heard shouts and cries at the house, the barking of dogs, and the sounds of pursuit.
Neva dared not venture down to the loch, nor dared she risk an appeal to the sailors on board the yacht. Her safety lay in avoiding every one in the vicinity of the Wilderness, and she turned up the wild mountain side, with the idea of skirting the mountain and descending to the valley upon the opposite side.
The low-growing mountain shrubbery screened her from view, but it also impeded her flight. She bounded on and on, panting and breathless, but a horrible pain in her side compelled her to slacken her speed, and finally she proceeded onward at a walk. Her heart seemed bursting with the thronging life-blood, her head and body were one great throbbing pulse, and her feet grew heavy as if clogged with leaden weights.
Unable to proceed further without rest, she sat down upon a huge boulder under a protecting cliff to rest. The gray morning scarcely penetrated to the gloomy spot in which she had halted. The trees were all around her, and the winds made wild moaning among their branches. She could see nothing of the Wilderness, nor of any house. She was lost in the pathless wild, in the chill gray morning, with a drizzling mist, as she now for the first time noticed, falling all around her like a heavy mourning vail.
“At any rate, I am free,” she thought, lifting her pale wild face to the frowning sky in rapture. “Free! O God, I thank thee!”