Blindly Jean plunged through the dense mist that hung outside, her feet sinking into the sodden earth as she fled across the wet grass. She had no idea where the gate might be, but sped desperately onwards till she rushed full tilt into the bank of mud and stones which fenced the bungalow against the moor. The sudden impact nearly knocked all the breath out of her body, but she dared not pause. She trusted that his search for the hidden sugar basin might delay Burke long enough to give her a few minutes’ start, but she knew very well that he might chance upon it at any moment, and then, discovering her flight, come in pursuit.
Clawing wildly at the bank with hands and feet, slipping, sliding, bruised by sharp-angled stones and pricked by some unseen bushy growth of gorse, she scrambled over the bank and came sliding down upon her hands and knees into the hedge-trough dug upon its further side. And even as she picked herself up, shaken and gasping for breath, she heard a cry from the bungalow, and then the sound of running steps and Burke’s voice calling her by name.
“Jean! Jean! You little fool!... Come back! Come back!” She heard him pause to listen for her whereabouts. Then he shouted again. “Come back! You’ll kill yourself! Jean! Jean!....”
But she made no answer. Distraught by fear lest he should overtake her, she raced recklessly ahead into the fog, heedless of the fact that she could not see a yard in front of her—even glad of it, knowing that the mist hung like a shielding curtain betwixt her and her pursuer.
The strange silence of the mist-laden atmosphere hemmed her round like the silence of a tomb, broken only by the sucking sound of the oozy turf as it pulled at her feet, clogging her steps. Lance-sharp spikes of gorse stabbed at her ankles as she trod it underfoot, and the permeating moisture in the air soaked swiftly through her thin summer frock till it clung about her like a winding-sheet.
Her breath was coming in sobbing gasps of stress and terror; her heart pounded in her breast; her limbs, impeded by her clinging skirts, felt as though they were weighted down with lead.
Then, all at once, seeming close at hand in the misleading fog which plays odd tricks with sound as well as sight, she heard Burke’s voice, cursing as he ran.
With the instinct of a hunted thing she swerved sharply, stumbled, and lurched forward in a vain effort to regain her balance. Then it seemed as though the ground wore suddenly cut from under her feet, and she fell... down, down through the mist, with a scattering of crumbling earth and rubble, and lay, at last, a crumpled, unconscious heap in the deep-cut track that linked the moor road to the bungalow.