Madelaine stiffened as she might have taken a blow she could not avoid. She did not attempt to fight back. She did not try to scream, to struggle, to excoriate him, to claw at his eyes. She endured the profanation until the boy’s temper was appeased. He could not hold her so always. His own position was too contorted. The moment his iron grip was loosened, she pushed open the car door and was over its edge in a flash. Down into the soggy, fern-choked ditch where the water trickled she jumped, falling on knees and hands. Her face was scratched. But she struggled up and darted around the rear of the car. Gordon knew she must go that way and on the opposite side he waited. His lips were laughing but his face was white. He had struck a shin-bone in scrambling from the machine to capture her and the pain was maddening. As well be killed now for a sheep as a lamb! He caught the girl roughly by her left shoulder and almost pulled her from her feet as he yanked her toward him. Never for an instant was Madelaine confused. Without a word she bent and scooped a handful of sand. Squarely in the young man’s features she threw it,—in his eyes, his nostrils, his half-opened mouth. Gordon emitted a hoarse bellow and loosed her. In that instant the girl darted away down the road, into the woodland shadow, back in the direction from which they had come. Gordon spat out mouthfuls of the grit and yowled his curses. But the stuff in his eyes was blinding. It gouged and seared his eyeballs, cutting and inflaming the lids so that a great wash of tears coursed down his face, streaking it ludicrously. He groped his way to the car and sank on the running board. Securing his handkerchief he swabbed his eyes. He was fifteen minutes clearing his sight. He lit the jets in the big brass head lamps, cranked the car, scratched the varnish viciously backing it into the brambles to turn it around, then started after Madelaine. He knew it to be four or five miles back to the main highway. Madelaine could not yet have covered the distance. So the big reflectors lighted the cloistered woods several hundred feet ahead and a cloud of ghostly dust hung low in his rear. Madelaine, fleeing along the shadowed wood-road, heard and saw the machine coming behind, before it made the turn. She darted into a copse of willows and hid there until it passed, Gordon low above the wheel, one hand holding his handkerchief to his face. So he missed her, ultimately reaching the Amherst highway in another fit of black rage and disappointment.