From over the brow of the hilly field behind her, quite a number of cattle were coming at a fair pace towards her.
Now Trix hated cows in any shape or form, and these were the unpleasant white-faced, brown cattle, whose very appearance is against them. They were moving quickly too, quite alarmingly quickly.
Trix cast one terrified and pathetic glance over her shoulder. The glance was all-sufficient. She ran,—ran straight for the wood, the cattle after her. Doubtless curiosity, mere enquiry maybe, prompted their pursuit. Trix concerned herself not at all with the motive, the fact was all-sufficient. Fear lent wings to her feet, and with the horned and horrid beasts still some ten yards behind her, she precipitated herself across the fence to fall in an undignified but wholly relieved heap among a mass of bracken and whortleberry bushes. The briefest of moments saw her once more on her feet, struggling, fighting her way through shoulder-high bracken. Five minutes brought her to an open space beyond. Trembling, breathless, and most suspiciously near tears, she sank upon the ground.
“The beasts!” ejaculated Trix opprobriously, and not as the mere statement of an obvious fact. She took off her hat, which flight had flung to a somewhat rakish angle, and blinked vigorously towards the trees. She was not going to cry.
Presently fright gave place to interest. She gazed around, curious, speculative. It was an unusual wood, a strange wood, a wood of holly trees, with a scattered sprinkling of beech trees. The grey twisted trunks of the hollies gleamed among the dark foliage, giving an eerie and almost uncanny atmosphere to the place. It was extraordinarily silent, too; and infinitely lonelier than the deserted moorland. It gave Trix an odd feeling of unpleasant mystery. Yet there was nothing for it but to face the mystery, to see if she could not find some way out further adown the wood. Not for untold gold would she again have faced those horned beasts behind her.
A tiny narrow path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the weirdness of the wood.
Now and again she stopped to pick and eat whortleberries from the massed bushes beneath the trees. She did not particularly like them, truly; nevertheless she was still young enough to pick and eat what nature had provided for picking and eating, and that for the mere pleasure of being able to do so. Also, at this juncture the action brought confidence in its train.
Presently, through the trees facing her, she saw a wall, a high wall, a brick wall, and quite evidently bordering civilization.
“It can’t go on for ever,” considered Trix. “It must come to an end some time, either right, or left. And I’m not going back.” This last exceedingly firmly.
She went forward, scrutinizing, anxious. And then,—joyful and welcome sight!—a door, an open door came into view. A mound of half-carted leaf mould just without showed, to any one endowed with even the meanest powers of deduction, that someone—some man, probably—was busy in the neighbourhood.