"Next morning, when I wakened, I found that every slave had run off, except one old woman. She, nearly a hundred years old and very feeble, told me that fear had come to them in the night, and that they had run like rabbits. With them had gone the horses, and all but one cow." "They deserted you!" cried Lanark hotly. "If they truly felt the fear that came here to make its dwelling-place!" Enid Mandifer smiled sadly, as if in forgiveness of the fugitives. "But to resume; the old aunty and I made out here somehow. The war went on, but it seemed far away; and indeed it was far away. We watched the grass die before June, the leaves fall, the beauty of this place vanish." "I am wondering about that death of grass and leaves," put in Lanark. "You connect it, somehow, with the unholiness at Fearful Rock; yet things grow there." "Nobody is being punished there," she reminded succinctly. "Well, we had the chickens and the cow, but no crops would grow. If they had, we needed hands to farm them. Last winter aunty died, too. I buried her myself, in the back yard." "With nobody to help you?" "I found out that nobody cared or dared to help." Enid said that very slowly, and did not elaborate upon it. "One Negro, who lives down the road a mile, has had some mercy. When I need anything, I carry one of my gold pieces to him. He buys for me, and in a day or so I seek him out and get whatever it is. He keeps the change for his trouble." Lanark, who had thought it cold upon the porch of the house, now mopped his brow as though it were a day in August. "You must leave here," he said. "I have no place to go," she replied, "and if I had I would not dare." "You would not dare?" he echoed uncomprehendingly. "I must tell you something else. It is that my stepfather and Larue--his son--are still here." "What do you mean? They were killed," Lanark protested. "I saw them fall. I myself examined their bodies." "They were killed, yes. But they are here, perhaps within earshot." It was his turn to gaze searchingly into her eyes. He looked for madness, but he found none. She was apparently sane and truthful. "I do not see them," she was saying, "or, at most, I see only their sliding shadows in the evening. But I know of them, just around a corner or behind a chair. Have you never known and recognized someone just behind you, before you looked? Sometimes they sneer or smile. Have you," she asked, "ever felt someone smiling at you, even though you could not see him?" Lanark knew what she meant. "But stop and think," he urged, trying to hearten her, "that nothing has happened to you--nothing too dreadful--although so much was promised when you failed to go through with that ceremony."