Here her shifting, crowding thoughts blotted out the glimmer of understanding, as flies clustering on a window-pane can blot out light; yet the word _suicide_ remained in her mind, disturbing, vaguely suggestive. It was connected with something terrible--she could not remember what--that in its turn was one with the vague horror at her elbow, that walked with the echo of her footsteps and panted with the echoes of her breaths, and yet was not real at all, but only in her mind. She did not believe she should ever find her way out of the wood.... The hyacinths in her arms were so heavy--a queerly familiar weight: and the sun had gone in, which had, somehow, something to do with the trouble.... She felt the black depression of the winter months that she had left Utterbridge to escape settling down on her once more. She turned hopelessly to elude it, but it surrounded her like a fog, as indeed she half believed it to be. She supposed they had sudden fogs in the country, when the sun went in.... And the sun had gone in because she had picked all the hyacinths.... She remembered the story clearly enough now.... The sun had played at quoits with a child, and had thrown amiss, and killed it, and the purple blood had trickled down from the child's forehead.... So the sun had turned it into purple hyacinths.... But she, Alwynne, had been gathering all the hyacinths, and they were a heavy bunch, heavy as a dead child's body ... and in another minute they would be disenchanted, and she would be carrying a dead child's body in her arms.... She stood still, gazing down at the flowers, white and glassy-eyed with terror, wondering that she was still alive and not yet mad. For she knew that the fear she had feared was upon her at last. She dared not blink lest in that second the change should take place, and she should find Louise, long buried, in her arms. Because, of course, it was Louise who had been following her all the while.... Louise--who had committed suicide.... She was following Alwynne, because it was Alwynne's fault.... Clare had said so.... Well--at least she could tell Louise that she had meant no harm.... She waited, swayed back against a tree trunk, the flowers a dead weight over her arm. She held them gently, lest a rough movement should wake the horror they hid. With what was left of sanity she prayed. The trees encircled her, watching. From far away there came once more a sound of footsteps. CHAPTER XXXIII