She went on to the outer door. This had been locked and bolted. But she turned the key and drew back the bolt. When she stepped without she actually gasped in the intensity of her excitement. But she moved quietly, her lips held tightly together, her eyes gleaming, her face colorless. Once outside the door, she stepped off the piazza and began to run. She ran at the full speed of which she was capable; but, curiously, she did not run towards the shore, but down the carriage-drive that led to the public highway. Once on the road, she did not slacken her pace until she was so breathless that she must pause. Then she stood still in the middle of the road, panting, but conscious of a certain relief from the tension that had been upon her as she had sat by her mother's side. "I could not have kept still one moment longer,--no, not one instant." She spoke loudly into the silence of the night. A low wind sobbed through some birches near her. It was only a low wind now; all violence had gone out of it. When Carolyn looked back upon this night, she always recalled precisely how the wind sounded in the birches as she stood in the road, struggling for breath after her run. There was a damp perfume of rose-geranium clinging to her skirts, for she had trampled upon a shrub of geranium as she had once swerved from the path. She tried not to listen, but she could not help straining forward to hear something, though she was fully aware that she had come away from the shore. She was also fully aware that by this time Lawrence and his companion could easily have returned; that is, if they had gone a few miles only, as was to be expected. They had gone farther. What was Prudence saying to Rodney? What the tone of her voice? What the glance of her eyes in the dusk? "What? What?" Carolyn shouted out that word. She was almost beside herself, and, knowing this, she shrank back as she heard her own voice call thus into the darkness. "I must be still,--still," she said, again. "If I give way, I cannot tell what I shall do." A pause, during which she listened. Then she said, with a terrible vindictiveness: "I hate her! hate her! hate her!" There was a wild satisfaction in shouting this to the night. "But how foolish I am!" She pushed her hair back from her face, and was startled to feel how burning hot her cheeks felt to her cold hands. Soon she turned and walked homeward,--walked soberly, as if she were thinking calmly of a subject indifferent to her. She went in at the door, which had been open, and softly entered the room she had just left. Her mother wakened and raised her head. "They've come, haven't they?" she asked. "No." "Oh, well," she said, comfortably, "I suppose they went farther than they intended; but it was very thoughtless of them,--very; and I shall tell them so. Don't you think we might better go to bed, Caro dear?" "You go, mamma; do go," was the girl's response.