It was after nine o’clock when Madelaine emerged from the wood. She saw the valley and its main highway ghostly in the starlight before her. Far to the north an electric car was coming,—bobbing up and down on the uneven roadbed. She climbed a low fence on the south and ran swiftly across the hay stubble in a diagonal direction. With deer-like, gymnastic suppleness she covered the distance. Into the highway she finally stumbled, hair fallen free and lungs distressed. But the electric car was still far down the line. She had time to recover her breath, cleanse her scratched face, and arrange hair and clothing before the car worked its rocking way toward her. No one could detect in the pretty, flushed girl who boarded that trolley the recent victim of a near-assault in the woods to the eastward. The car went through to Holyoke. Madelaine remained aboard. While waiting to secure a Springfield connection, she slipped into a High Street drug store and called Mrs. Anderson. As she now suspected, Gordon had not ’phoned The Elms. Mrs. Anderson was informed that she need not expect her pupil back that evening, as Madelaine had left suddenly for Springfield. Then Madelaine called her mother but her trolley arrived before she had secured her number. Gordon left his auto on the main road, extinguished its lamps and went back toward the woods afoot, hoping to encounter his nimble foster-cousin. “All right, you little wildcat,” he snapped as he returned to his machine an hour later. “Get lost if you want! But believe me, next time I get you alone, it’ll be where there’s no sand to throw in my eyes. A catty woman’s dirty trick! We’ll see!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIII GOD AND THINGS I A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a wide, smooth body of water between indolent, pastoral hills and fern-clogged, wooded shores musty with swamp bog or rotting second-growth. Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes wallowing in the bogs along the shore.