Suddenly the path grew smoother; even, it seemed to Antony, more slippery. The wheels took a different motion, the noise of machinery grew by tiny degrees less and lower and died into a drone. It almost seemed that they were gliding with the force of gravity alone, for the track (now a broad muddy band) dipped slightly but steadily. They appeared to be bound for a providential gap in an ugly stone wall; below this stretched a wonderfully green field bounded by a thick row of feathery sage-coloured trees, the first full foliage they had seen. Drugged with the steady head-wind of their flight, his hands mechanically glued to the wheel, his brain a mere phonograph that sang, over and over, "Keep in the track! Keep In the track!" Antony took his juggernaut through the scant six feet in the wall, marked how those of the cattle that had crowded through the opening made for the thinnest place in the fringe of trees, tried to estimate the force of a collision with one of those gnarled and twisted trunks, and realised to his horror that all power of initiative was exhausted in him. Helpless and hypnotised, fatalistic as a wild-riding Arab, he could only sit and grasp the wheel and wonder vaguely what would happen. Would she jump? He was practically certain that the motive-power was completely or nearly exhausted, and that they were slipping along on a different and sloping soil. Even as this flashed through his mind he saw a welcome gap in the sage-green trees and made for it, though in doing so he left the path, which, for that matter, split inexplicably into many tiny paths. What was that behind the green? What fields or walls or trees are blue? What blue shimmers and sparkles? . . . "Jump! Jump!" he cried, hoarsely, but she sat fascinated, turned to stone by his side. As one watches the water in a globe of coloured glass by the seashore and smiles at the tiny splashing mites that sport in it, so Antony watched a large red-and-white cow stagger helplessly down a steepish slope, and smiled as she plunged clumsily into the broad river. "It is beyond her depth, for she is swimming," he thought, and then they hung for three seconds on the brink of the tiny slope, a maddening three seconds, in which they might have jumped, but could not--and plunged, with a sharp, sweet scream from the rigid girl by his side, into the river. It rose up strangely, as it seemed, to meet them, and with the cold shock of the water Antony's will returned to him, and he rolled over the side of the car before it was quite submerged, dragging Nette with him, and pitching her over beyond him with his left arm. She slipped from his grasp by the very force of the movement and went down, and the current caught them both. THE RETURN III. THE RETURN