He had made his leap with all the care possible, but the speed of the train was such that only the snow and his padded clothing saved him from serious injury. As it was it was some minutes before he could regain his breath, and then it came with a keen stab that seemed a sword piercing his shoulder--a sharp complaint from the recent wound. He rose painfully, but at the first step collapsed with a groan, realising that he had twisted his ankle badly. With lips compressed from the wretched pang, he rose again and set the injured member to the ground, forcing it to bear his weight. For a while each step was agony, then this dulled somewhat and he went steadily on, limping along the uneven ties. When he came to the crest of the rise he stopped and looked about him. He knew, roughly, where he was. Across the dark valley unrolling at his feet under a sky that shook with stars, he could dimly make out another darker ridge. Beyond lay a deeper valley and beyond that the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, and there, forty miles away as the crow flies--how far by the irregular route he must take he could not estimate--lay his mountain lodge, the lonely little demesne of forest and stream, whither he had been wont to go for summer weeks of hunting and fishing, with its rough but spacious bungalow presided over by his care-taker, old "Jubilee Jim," whose father had been a slave of his father before the Civil War. Forty miles as the crow flies! Across a difficult and sparsely-settled country, with now only the faint moonlight and a natural instinct of direction to guide him, in patent-leather shoes and with a sprained ankle! He set his teeth and plunged down the declivity through the tumbled rocks and snow-drifts. CHAPTER XXXIV THE CRUCIBLE Echo stood at the gate of Midfields, her gloved hand delaying to close it, her eyes gazing down the featureless street along which yellow window-squares were beginning to spring out, and vague figures moved, now standing out sharply under the newly lighted arc-lamps at the crossing, now vanishing beyond into the chill windless dusk. Behind her lay the purpling lawn, with its tumult of leaves under the acacias, the oaks with their red-lipped foliage and the tall chrysanthemums at the edge of the frost-touched grass that stretched like the skins of young fawns about the great house with its fluted columns, dim and grey now in the deepening twilight. About her were only the quiet of the cold evening, the bewildered shadows huddling beneath the shrubs, and the faint snap of frosty tree-branches in the tightening of the first bonds of winter, above only the windless silence and a wild white moon flowing through dusky wreaths of cloud. But she felt no soothing influence in the hush.