A little tree was beside her and its leaves in the uncanny light looked like crisp black metal. The sea was grey. The sunrise was still far off. Karen sank beneath the tree and leaned her head against it. What should she do if she were unable to walk on? There was still time--hours and hours of time--till the train left Falmouth; but how was she to reach Falmouth? Fears rolled in upon her like dark breakers, heaping themselves one upon the other, stealthy, swift, not to be escaped. She saw the horrible kindness in Mrs. Talcott's eyes, relegated, not relinquished. She saw herself pursued, entrapped, confronted by Gregory, equally entrapped, forced by her need, her helplessness, to come to her and coldly determined--as she had seen him on that dreadful evening of their parting--to do his duty by her, to make her and to keep her safe, and his own dignity secure. To see him again, to strive against him again, weaponless, now, without refuge, and revealed to herself and to him as a creature whose whole life had been founded on illusion, to strive not only against his ironic authority but, worst of all, against a longing, unavowed, unlooked at, a longing that crippled and unstrung her, and that ran under everything like a hidden river under granite hills--she would die, she felt, rather than endure it. She had closed her eyes as she leaned her head against the tree and when she opened them she saw that the leaves of the tree had turned from black to green and that the grass was green and the sea and sky faintly blue. Above her head the long, carved ripples of the morning cirri flushed with a heavenly pink and there came from a thicket of a little wood the first soft whistle of a wakened bird. Another came and then another, and suddenly the air was full of an almost jangling sweetness. Karen felt herself trembling. Shudders ran over her. She was ravished to life, yet without the answering power of life. Her longing, her loneliness, her fear, were part of the intolerable loveliness and they pierced her through and through. She struggled to her feet, holding the tree in her clasp, and, after the galvanised effort, she closed her eyes again, and again leaned her head upon the bark. Then it was that she heard footsteps, sudden footsteps, near. For a moment a paralysis of fear held down her eyelids. "_Ach Gott!_" she heard. And opening her eyes, she saw Franz Lippheim before her. Franz Lippheim was dressed, very strangely dressed, in tweeds and knicker-bockers and wore a soft round hat with a quill in it--the oddest of hats--and had a knapsack on his back. The colours of the coming day were caricatured in his ruddy face and red-gold hair, his bright green stockings and bright red tie. He was Germanic, flagrant, incredible, and a Perseus, an undreamed of, God-sent Perseus. "_Ach Gott!_ Can it be so!" he was saying, as he approached her, walking softly as though in fear of dispersing a vision.