Somehow, she never knew how, she let herself out into the hall, and thence she sped through the long corridor, down the stairs, past the open door of the vacant library, and out into the grounds. She met no one, and when at last she paused in the dense shadows of some thick shrubbery, she had the satisfaction of feeling that she had been unobserved. Here, too, she was quite secluded, and in the effort to collect herself she sat down on the grass, her knees drawn up, her forehead resting on them, her clasped hands strained about them.
How long she remained so, while her leaping heart grew gradually calmer, she did not know.
A sound aroused her from her lethargy. It was the clear whistle of some one calling a dog. She knew who it was before a voice said,
“Here, Comrade—come to me, sir.”
The voice was not far off, but the shrubbery was between it and her. She would have felt safe but for the dog. She did not move a muscle.
The footsteps were drawing near her, and now bounding leaps of a dog could be heard also. Both passed, and she began to breathe more freely, when what she had dreaded came. The dog, stopping his gambols, began to sniff about him. The next moment he had bounded through the shrubbery and was yelping gleefully at her side.
Instantly she sprang to her feet and stood there, slight and tall and straight in her long black wrap, the image of pallid woe. All the blood had left her face, and her eyes were wide and terrified.
It was so that she appeared to the man who, parting the branches of the thick foliage, stood silent and surprised before her. She might have been the very spirit of widowhood, so desolate she looked.
Raising his hat automatically, he said, in a strained, unnatural voice, “Can I do anything for you?”
She tried to speak, but speech eluded her.