Tears began to roll down her cheeks; excitement and wounded pride and the novelty of a definite object had kept her up; but at last these guides and supporters were losing their hold and her heart was sinking in the face of the cheerless outlook. Her teeth chattered and her head felt like lead. When she got up she was shaking so much that she had to lean against a tree. She dared not think of the miles between her and that little village over Losbury bridge, and she could not afford to await the falling of the light as she had meant to do before trusting herself to the open road. Down below her was yet one more pasture, and then she must emerge on the highway and take her chance of meeting some wayfarer who might recognise her. She plodded on, thinking less of that risk than of the increasing misery of dragging herself forward. A climb down a steep hedge-grown bank would bring her out not fifty yards from the whitewashed walls of a toll-house. Half a mile east of it was Losbury bridge, spanning a reach of the river above the flat, green meadows. She looked up and down the road as she stood on the bank and bent back the strong suckers in the gap she had chosen; there was not a human creature within sight. A white milestone was on the hither side of the white toll and the white gates which barred the way. The window stared towards her up the vacant thoroughfare after the sleepless, vigilant fashion of toll-house windows. She began to scramble down, clinging to the tough whips of hazel; there was a cluster of nuts just by her shoulder, and she paused to gather it. She was not hungry, but she might be hungry yet and thankful for so much as a few filberts. As she turned, stretching out her disengaged hand, her foot went from under her. She was not the only person who had made a passage through that gap, and the wet mud had been trodden into a slide by some one else's heel. The springy bough flew upwards, tearing itself from her grasp as she slipped and fell. She lay at the roadside with one foot doubled beneath her. Movement brought a feeling of such deathly sickness that she raised her head only to drop it again on the moss of the bank. She felt sure that her leg must be broken, and, not daring to stir, forgot all but the black, imminent fear of pain; the moment's despair was enough for her without the additional bewilderment of looking further. She gathered her wits again to consider how long it might be before some one passed, and she prayed for the sound of human approach as earnestly as she dreaded it. But for the distant bark of a dog, the encompassing rural life might have been extinct and she herself in the desert of Sahara.