Dennison meanwhile, as soon as he had recognized his waitress at the top of the descent (he had not distinguished who it was before, his eyesight not being so keen as Gray's), had left his tree, and, darting across the intervening space, he now caught her arm tightly at the elbow, while her hand was still in her pocket. Gray hurried to his aid, and seized her other wrist, dragging her fingers away from the girl on the ground; thus holding her between them, they pulled her to her feet. As they did so her right hand came out of her pocket. It held a murderous-looking knife. "You devil," said Dennison, in Italian, "drop that knife!" They held her so closely that she could not move, but her face glared at them in the moonlight. It was like nothing human; her head was thrust out, the eyes were narrowed and glittering, the nostrils flattened, and the lips drawn up and back from the set, fierce teeth. Their four figures--three standing, one on the ground--were below the slope, and no one saw them. There had been no sound from the prostrate girl, who had lost consciousness from fright, paralyzed by the terrible countenance of the woman who had attacked her; and the waitress herself had made no sound as she came. She made no sound now, save that she panted as she breathed; she was like a wild beast who had made one spring and is about to make another. "Drop the knife, or you shall go to prison," said Dennison, sternly, his hands on her shoulder like a vise. Her fingers did not move. "Listen. If you don't drop it, I swear to you I'll send Goro to America by the next Leghorn steamer, with five hundred lire in his pocket." The knife dropped. "Pick it up," said Dennison to Gray, in English. "Now see if you can lift that girl and carry her down the hill. Get her across the field somehow to that stone wall where we climbed over; wait there for me--unless she should come to on the way, in which case perhaps she will be able to climb over the wall herself. If she does, wait there with her by the phaeton. I sha'n't be long. But I must take this she-wolf back to the house first." Gray had bent down; he lifted the inert body at their feet, raising it a little, and as he did so the head fell back, and the moonlight, shining on the hair and temples, showed that it was the Swede. Modesta, as she too saw the face, made a spring at it. But Dennison jerked her back. Then, with a snarling sound in her throat, she twisted her head round, and bit savagely at his hand where it held her shoulder. "Do hurry. She is perfectly insane," he said to Gray.