It was just a bit of "saft" ground, as they call it in Scotland, and she was not troubled. She went on again, more swiftly than before, eager to cross it, then to wait for Wiggles. One moment later she would have heard Giles' voice shouting—but— A false step; and she plunged in, over both ankles. It took her by surprise. The effort to save herself might have proved successful, had she been going cautiously. But the impetus of her run made it impossible to stop; and as she tried to leap to what looked like a firm spot, she caught her foot in a tangle of rushes. She fell far forward, spread-eagle fashion, sliding on with the struggle to save herself, down into the horrible slimy bog, which yielded beneath her. Phyllys was a girl of high courage, but in that moment of terrible helplessness and sinking, the soft, sucking, sticky grip upon her limbs and the sense of nothing to cling to, nothing to hold by, nothing to pull against, brought a sickening agony of terror. CHAPTER X DIREFUL REALISATIONS SHE knew what it meant. Thought at such a time is rapid; and as she went down, as she felt the black slime rising around her, she knew she was in a quaking bog, that bog upon the fell against which she had been often warned; that bog which, had she been questioned one minute sooner, she would have averred to be at least half-a-mile away, in the most unfrequented part of the moor. And she was in it—lying face downward upon its treacherous surface; the bright deceptive moss giving way like paper under her weight, the dark half-liquid peat covering her limbs. Had this been winter, had the accident happened after any spell of heavy rain, no hope for Phyllys could have existed. At such seasons the whole swamp was a lake of foul watery mud, in which she would have instantly sunk, and from the first plunge nothing more would have been seen or heard of the hapless girl. Strong men, lost on the moors after dark, had so met their end; and as she fell, she remembered the last—a traveller who had inadvertently leaped upon the smooth surface, and had disappeared from sight. But the weather lately had been dry, and the peat-mud was in a semi-liquid, tenacious condition, capable of bearing up a prone body for at least several minutes. One other pressing peril was met. Falling thus, she might have met with immediate suffocation, but that her heavy shawl, thrown from the front over both shoulders, dropped upon the bog outspread below her face, guarding nose and mouth from the smothering grip of the mud. At the first moment, as she realised what had occurred, she fought wildly, desperately, to escape. But she had gone too far, sliding beyond reach of firm ground, and she had nothing to hold by. She was powerless to drag her feet from the gripping black stuff. She had nothing to grasp, nothing which would give her a purchase, and each effort sent her deeper. It seemed that she was being slowly dragged under.