It seemed to him, as he strode on behind them with irate steps, that they would never get out of the woods. Little woodland sounds, a snapping bough, a breaking leaf, a scurrying squirrel, sounds that he would not ordinarily have noticed, now startled him into fright. The gradual failing of the light oppressed him almost to panic; and when the early twilight settled somberly over the woods, such weird, moving shadows rose up all around him that he would fain have taken to his heels had he not feared what lay before him more.
Crazy Lisbeth scrubbing his mother's kitchen floor was only a harmless "innocent," the pensioner of his condescending pity; but Crazy Lisbeth in the woods at nightfall—Ah, then she became a different and a dreadful creature, one to shake the heart and alarm the nerves of the bravest.
Sheila appeared to think otherwise and to find Lisbeth docile enough, for despite Ted's conviction that the homeward way was interminable, these two went steadily onward and at a fair pace. And after no long interval their attendant knight had the satisfaction of following them from the covert of the woods into the open spaces of the town.
Here Ted's alarms left him, abruptly and completely. He could have laughed aloud at the bogies he had escaped. His self-respect came swaggering back, and with it the determination to assert a belated mastery of Sheila. She was not a block ahead, and now he hailed her.
But as she had done in the woods, she merely called to him over her shoulder: "We're going home!"
Crazy Lisbeth lived on the other side of the town, in a mean little cottage that more fortunate householders had deserted. It was a long walk there and the hour was already late, seven at the least. A vision of Mrs. Caldwell watching for Sheila flashed across Ted's mind and strengthened his resistance against this further perversity.
"You must go with me right away!" he exclaimed, hastening after Sheila. "Your grandmother'll be scared to death!"
"Oh," cried Sheila, stopping now, but with her hand still resolutely gripping Lisbeth's, "Oh, I know it, Ted! But I can't help it!" And though her tone was sharp with distress, she turned obstinately on.
There was nothing for him but to follow her to the end of her adventure. Ted knew it from experience. Sheila in one of her moods, obsessed by some "queer notion," was immovable, though sweetly reasonable at all other times. So with a bad grace he went on in her wake, beset now, not by fear, but by keen resentment of the whole absurd situation.
Thus they came at last, the ill-assorted trio, to Lisbeth's cottage, sitting lonely and unlit by lamp or fire upon a bare hillside. Sheila and Lisbeth paused, and Ted stopped, too, still a few yards from them, but expectant of some further freak and ready to spring forward with a rebuke that would end the mad episode on the spot. But just then the moon swung slowly out from some prisoning cloud, flooding the hillside with light, and as Ted saw Lisbeth's face, he forgot his intention of remonstrance and could but stand and gaze.