"You poor soul," I said, "whatever you are, and whatever you've done, I will shelter you and help you to escape."
I felt I really could not take her into the house, so I added, "I have a little stable in the garden, quite private, with nice dry hay in it. Follow me."
I suppose she saw at a glance that she could trust me, for she nodded, and I sped down the hill, she following at a little distance, with the shrieking, denouncing wind behind us. I walked as quickly as I could, but when I got as far as the water-meadows my strength and breath gave way. I was never robust, and always foolishly prone to overtax my small store of strength. I was obliged to stop and lean my head on my arms against a stile.
"There is no need for such hurry," she said tranquilly. She had come up noiselessly behind me. "There is not a soul in sight. Besides, look what you are missing."
She pointed to the familiar fields before me which we had yet to cross, with the Dieben winding through them under his low, red-brick bridges, and beyond the little clustered village with its grey church spire standing shoulder high above the poplars.
The sun had just set and there was no colour in the west, but over all the homely, wind-swept landscape a solemn and unearthly light shone and slowly passed, shone and slowly passed.
"Look up," said my companion, turning a face of flame towards me.
I looked up into the sky, as into an enormous furnace. Gigantic rolling clouds of flame were sweeping before the roaring wind like some vast prairie fire across the firmament. As they passed overhead, the reflection of the lurid light on them was smitten earthwards, and passed with them, making everything it traversed clear as noon—the lion on the swinging sign of the public-house just across the water, the delicate tracery of the church windows, the virginia creeper on my cottage porch.
"I have only seen an afterglow like that once in my life," my companion said, "and that was in Teneriffe."
A few moments more, and the sky paled to grey. The darkness came down with tropical suddenness. I made a movement forwards.