I am almost as unwilling to leave Maryvale to his own devices as to leave Paula Lebetwood unsought for on the hills. But we must find her!
7.45 P.M.
The last stragglers have not even yet returned from the uplands.
Hours of starved hope they were, while I stumbled along the half-blind paths, often bewildered, once quite lost myself. It was dogged work. I never should have struggled through without an inexorable motive and the faintest glimmer of a clue, a clue offered me by Salt many days ago. Had he not told how in his boyhood he had found “something like” the oratory of St. Tarw? I had kept the directions he had given, and now in a forlorn hazard I followed them, since they alone might lead me to some definite place that she, too, might have sought.
In observing Salt’s tuition, I was obliged to keep for the most part below the crown of the hills. The flanks were cut by gorges where water had eaten its way. In these places I made but indifferent progress. In a dusky dingle I did no better, and although I gasped in relief at finding what seemed a path, it proved unfriendly, for it led me into a covert of dogwood whose small green berries were turning purple-black, and deserted me there. I got out somehow, although spines clutched me. Before me, stretching into the upper fog, extended a curtain of rock and gravel. I attacked it with feet and hands.
It seemed to go up and up forever. In that frantic climb, out of a bottom soon invisible, up to a summit veiled in fog, I tore a finger-nail and broke into the flesh of my left palm. I paused on a splintery ledge to bind my handkerchief over the wound, and rested there awhile. It was then that I thought of looking, not up or down, but sidewise.
A brief cry escaped me. I could see further on the left, and what I saw quickened my heart.
A few yards away the rock curtain ended somewhat abruptly, and beyond appeared a brief slope full of stunted trees. Even further in the same direction, the trees gave place to shorter, tangled growth intermixed with grassy patches. Here and there a monolith thrust up from the surface, which on the whole was fairly level, though a vague darkness in the background showed that this clearing was not the summit of any hill, but a platform more or less below the highest elevation.
Along the outer edge of the cleared space stood a regiment of trees, whose ranks were quite dense enough to conceal what lay behind from eyes in the hollow of the Vale. Having gained the grassy platform with its curious black stones sprouting and littered about, I found that while I continued in the same direction over the tumbled grass full of small scarlet toadstools, the ground grew higher and the dark mass of the hilltop closer, while the platform narrowed.
My hope caught fire and blazed. I kept peering ahead and slightly upward, for the gentle slope persisted. Suddenly I saw Miss Lebetwood, very dim in the mist.