May ran like a frightened rabbit along the beach, stopping occasionally to listen. From the dance hall came an uproar and oaths and cries broke the silence of the night. At her heels two men ran, lumbering along slowly. The drink within had taken effect and one of them fell. As she ran May came presently into the place of huge stumps and logs, thrown up by the storms of winter, and saw Maud Welliver standing at the edge of the water with the grocer Hunt—who had his arm about Maud’s waist. The frightened woman ran so close to them that she might have touched Maud’s dress but they were unconscious of her presence and, as for May, she was in an odd way afraid of them also. She was afraid of everything human. “It all comes to something ugly and terrible,” she thought frantically. May ran for nearly two miles, along the beach, among the tree stumps, the roots of which stuck up into the air like arms raised in supplication to the moon. Perhaps the dry withered old tree arms, sticking up thus, kept her physical fear alive, as it is not likely Sid Gould’s drunken companions followed her far. She ran clinging to Lillian Edgley’s hat—she had borrowed without permission—and that, I presume, seemed a thing of beauty to her. Something conscientious and fine in her made her cling desperately to the hat and she had held it in her left hand and safely out of harm’s way, even in the moment when she was belaboring Sid Gould with the stick of driftwood. And now she ran, still clinging to the hat, and was afraid with a fear that was no longer physical. The new fear that swept in upon her comprehended something more than the grotesque masses of tree roots, that now appeared to dance madly in the moonlight, something more than Sid Gould, Cal Mosher and Jerome Hadley—that had become a fear of life itself, of all she had ever known of life, all she had ever been permitted to see of life—that fear was now heavy upon her. Little May Edgley did not want to live any more. “Death is a kind and comforting thing to those who are through with life,” an old farm horse had seemed to say to a boy, who, a few days later, ran in terror from the sight of May Edgley’s dead body to lean trembling on the old horse’s manger. What actually happened on that terrible night when May ran so madly was that she came in her flight to where a creek runs down into the bay. There are good fishing places off the mouth of the creek. At the creek’s mouth the water spreads itself out, so that the small stream looks, from a distance, like a strong river, but one coming along the beach—running along the beach, in the moonlight, let us say—from the west would run almost to the eastern bank in the shallow water, that came only to the shoe tops.