If I lay here any longer, surely the troopers would find me. I must up and on. It seemed to me that a great hand came out of the sky and blotted out my pain as someone might blot out an error upon a child’s slate. I was strong again. I sprang to my feet. My limb was sound once more. I ran across the moor like a hind let loose and in the darkness I stepped over a precipice and fell unendingly down. The minutes passed, and I saw them gather themselves into little heaps of hours that stood like cairns of stone on the top of the precipice. The hours piled themselves into days and the days into weeks, till the top of the precipice was covered with stones, and still I was falling through unending space. Some time--I know not when--I must have come to the bottom of the precipice. I felt no crash, but the heaped-up cairns of the minutes and hours and days disappeared from my sight, and I ceased to know anything. I cannot tell how long this deep oblivion lasted. Once only did I wake from it partially. I felt a twinge of pain as though someone had moved me, and then all was dark again. *CHAPTER XV* *IN THE HAVEN OF DALDOWIE* A man may go to the very gate of death without knowing that he has stood within its shadow till he returns once more to the sunshine of life. I know not how long I lay, an unconscious mass, at the foot of the dream precipice of my delirium, but an hour came when I opened my eyes again. I opened them slowly, for even to lift my lids was an effort, and I looked above me to see if the carrion crows were still watching me. Instead I saw a low thatched roof, and in amazement I let my eyes wander to every side. I was lying on a soft mattress laid on a garret floor. My head was pillowed on a snowy pillow of down. Beside my couch stood a three-legged stool and on it there was a bowl of flowers. I stretched out a weak hand to take one. I picked up a buttercup that flaunted its proud gold before me, and I pressed it to my lips. I lay in a reverie and tried to gather together all I could remember of the past. I recollected my flight from the troopers, the thunderstorm and the rain, and then I remembered my injured limb. I tried to move it and found that it was firmly bound. I was too weak to raise myself and turn down the bedclothes to examine it, but there was further food for thought in the fact that my injury had been cared for. Where was I?--and who had brought me here and nursed me back to life again? Perplexed I could find no light to guide me, and weary with fruitless thoughts I fell asleep. When I woke up again my eyes rested upon a woman who was just beginning to appear through a trap-door in the floor. She entered the garret, bearing a cup whose contents gave off a generous odour. She came to my bedside and, carefully removing the flowers from the stool, sat down upon it, and looked at me. My wide-awake eyes met her astonished gaze.