The man, when he had stood up, it seemed to Charlotte, looked
directly at her. She was always sure that he did. But if he did, it
was with unseeing eyes. His brain did not compass the image of her
sitting there, leaning against the tree, a creature of incarnate
terror and insane fury. He seemed to keep his eyes fixed upon her for
a full second. Charlotte's nerves and muscles were tense with the
restrained impulse to spring. Then he slowly shuffled away. As he
passed, the squirrel slid like swiftness itself down the tree, and
across an open space to another. The girl sank limply upon herself in
a dead faint, and the tramp gained the road and trudged sullenly on
towards Ludbury.
When Charlotte came to herself she was still sitting there limply.
She could not realize all at once what had happened. Then she
remembered. She looked at the place where the tramp had lain, and so
forcibly did her terrified fancy project images that it was difficult
to convince herself that he was really gone. She seemed to still see
that gross thing lying there. Then she remembered distinctly that he
had gone.
She got up, but she could scarcely stand. She had never fainted
before, and she wondered at her own sensations. "What ails me?" she
thought. She strained her eyes around, but there was no sign of the
terrible man. She was quite sure that he had gone, and yet how could
she be sure? He might have gone out to the road and be sitting beside
it. A vivid recollection of tramps sitting beside that very road, as
she had been driving past, came over her. She became quite positive
that he was out on the road, and a terror of the road was over her.
She looked behind her, and the sunny gleam of an open field came
through the trees. The field was shaggy with blue asters and
golden-rod gone to seed, and white tufts of immortelles. Charlotte
stared through the trees at the field, and suddenly a man crossed the
little sunny opening. A great joy swept over her; he was Randolph
Anderson. Now she was sure that she was safe. She stumbled again to
her feet, and ran weakly out of the oak grove. There was a low fence
between the grove and the field, and when she reached that she
stopped. She felt this to be insurmountable for her trembling limbs.
"Oh, dear!" she said, aloud, and although the man was holding his
butterfly-net cautiously over the top of a clump of asters so far
away that it did not seem possible that he could hear her, he
immediately looked up. Then he hastened towards her. As he drew near
a look of concern deepened on his face. He had had an inkling at the
first glimpse of her that something was wrong. He reached the fence
and stood looking at her on the other side.
"I am afraid I can't get over," Charlotte said, faintly. She never
knew quite how she was over, lifted in some fashion, and Anderson
stood close to her, looking at her with his face as white as hers.
"What is it?" he asked. "Are you ill, Miss Carroll? What is it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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