And though the woman was still but a distant figure, she heard that piercing call and answered it with one as clear and passionate:
"My little girl! I'm coming! I'm coming!"
For an instant Ted stood motionless, struck to the earth by that simple horror of the unusual, the abnormal, which the very sane and unimaginative always feel. Then, with a single bound, he overtook Sheila and laid a detaining hand on her shoulder: "Sheila, stop! It's Crazy Lisbeth! I know her voice!"
He was right. The advancing figure was not the beautiful mother-spirit of Sheila's dream, but a flesh and blood mother who, years before, had lost her husband and only child, and become crazed by her grief. Ever since then her heart had been wandering on a piteous quest for her dead, and her wits with it. And because she was very poor and quite harmless, suffering only the illusion that she would sooner or later find her husband and little daughter, the town was kind to her; set her to work when she would; fed her when she would not work; and left her free for her sad and futile search.
Sheila and Ted knew her well and no fear of her had ever touched them before, but now, as she came onward with her insanity strong upon her, both terror and repugnance seized on Ted.
"She thinks you're her child," he said angrily. "And no wonder! What made you do such a thing?"
Sheila turned to him with her explanation on her lips—the whole confession of her dream and her momentary belief that it had come true—but at sight of him looking at her so protectingly and yet so severely, her impetuous words faltered and grew cold.
"I—I was thinking of my mother," she stammered shyly.
The unexpected reply embarrassed him. He wanted to scold her, but at this mention of her dead mother he could not. So he only dug his foot into the ground and gazed toward Lisbeth, who was now almost upon them, stumbling in her happy haste.
"We can't run away from her," said Sheila.