"How dark it is," she said, "how dear and dark! And how still! I suppose the trams are running just the same along the Boulevard Montparnasse,--and all the lights and people, and the noise. And I've been there all these months--and all the time this was here--this!" Paris was going on--all that muddle and maze of worried people. And she was out of it all; here, alone. Alone? A quick terror struck at the heart of her content. An abrupt horrible certainty froze her--the certainty that she was not alone. There was some living thing besides herself in the forest, quite near her--something other than the deer and the squirrels and the quiet dainty woodland people. She felt it in every fibre long before she heard that faint light sound that was not one of the forest noises. She stood still and listened. She had never been frightened of the dark--of the outdoor dark. At Long Barton she had never been afraid even to go past the church-yard in the dark night--the free night that had never held any terrors, only dreams. But now: she quickened her pace, and--yes--footsteps came on behind her. And in front the long straight ribbon of the road unwound, gray now in the shadow. There seemed to be no road turning to right or left. She could not go on forever. She would have to turn, sometime--if not now, yet sometime--in this black darkness, and then she would meet this thing that trod so softly, so stealthily behind her. Before she knew that she had ceased to walk, she was crouched in the black between two bushes. She had leapt as the deer leaps, and crouched, still as any deer. Her dark blue linen gown was one with the forest shadows. She breathed noiselessly--her eyes were turned to the gray ribbon of road that had been behind her. She had heard. Now she would see. She did see--something white and tall and straight. Oh, the relief of the tallness and straightness and whiteness! She had thought of something dwarfed and clumsy--dark, misshapen, slouching beast-like on two shapeless feet. Why were people afraid of tall white ghosts? It passed. It was a man--in a white suit. Just an ordinary man. No, not ordinary. The ordinary man in France does not wear white. Nor in England, except for boating and tennis and-- Flannels. Yes. The lunatic who boiled his brains in the sun! Betty's terror changed colour as the wave changes from green to white, but it lost not even so much of its force as the wave loses by the change. It held her moveless till the soft step of the tennis shoes died away. Then softly and hardly moving at all, moving so little that not a leaf of those friendly bushes rustled, she slipped off her shoes: took them in her hand, made one leap through the crackling, protesting undergrowth and fled back along the road, fleet as a greyhound. She ran and she walked, very fast, and then she ran again and never once did she pause to look or listen. If the lunatic caught her--well, he would catch her, but it should not be _her_ fault if he did.