There was a fireplace in the room, and, resting on the dogs in front of it, lay a heavy old-fashioned poker. Seizing it, she ran to the window and struck the bottom of the centre bar again and again with all her strength. The screws began to give. Now they were half-way out of the decaying woodwork, but she could force them no farther with blows. For a moment Joan seemed to be baffled, then she took refuge in a new expedient. Thrusting the poker outside of the bar to the right, and the end of it inside that which she was seeking to dislodge, she obtained a powerful leverage and pulled in jerks. At the third jerk her hand came suddenly in contact with the sharp angle of the brickwork, that rasped the skin from the back of it; the screws gave way, and the bar, slipping from the hole in which its top end was set, fell clattering down the ladder. Now the road was open, and it remained only for her to dress herself to the part. Half crying with the pain of her hurt and bleeding hand, quickly Joan put on the hat and overcoat, remembering even then that they were the same which Rock had worn when he came to see her in London, and, going to the window, she struggled through the two remaining bars on to the ladder. Reaching the ground, she ran through the garden to the heathland, for she feared lest the surviving dog should espy and attack her. But no dog appeared: perhaps the corpse of its brother that still lay by the gate kept it away. Now she was upon the heathland and heading straight for the ruins of Ramborough, which lay at a distance of about three-quarters of a mile from the house. The night was fine and the air soft, but floating clouds now and again obscured the face of the half-moon, that lay low in the sky, causing great shadows to strike suddenly across the moor. Her way ran past the meres, where the wind whispered drearily amongst the growing reeds and the nesting wild-fowl called to each other across the water. There was a great loneliness about the place; no living creature was to be seen; and, at the moment, this feeling of solitude weighed more heavily upon her numbed heart than the sense of the death that she was courting. The world was still with her, and its moods and accidents affected her as they had always done; but the possibilities of that other unrisen world upon whose brink she stood, and the fear of it, moved her but little, and she scarcely thought of what or where she might or might not be within an hour. Those terrors were to come.