She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village road below the hill. Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a gap in the trees. "_Drat_ Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I _won't_! I _won't_! I _won't_!" All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a stranger in a strange land--no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no lover, no anything--and now just for a flash, just for one "little, perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that _spoke her own language_, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another woman! She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "_Nothing_ is mine forever. Nothing, _nothing_, NOTHING!" she sobbed. A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her, and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one absolutely nonexistent, unborn, and tortured himself with the possibility of such a ghostly vacuum in his life. To the Girl suddenly it seemed as though puzzled, lonely, unmated, all her short years, she had stumbled now precipitously on the Great Cause Of It--a _vacuum_. It was not that she had lost any one, or missed any one. _It was simply that some one had never been born!_ The thought filled her with a whimsical new terror. She pounded the White Pony into a gallop and covered the last half-mile of the Runaway Road. At the crest of the hill the valley vista brightened palely and the White Pony gave a whimper of awakened home instinct. Cautiously, warily, with legs folding like a jack-knife he began the hazardous descent. Was he sleepy? Was he clumsy? Was he footsore? Just before the Runaway Road smoothed out into the village highway his knees wilted suddenly under him, and he pitched headlong with a hideous lurch that sent the Girl hurtling over his neck into a pitiful, cluttered heap among the dust and stones, where he came back after his first panicky run, and blew over her with dilated nostrils, and whimpered a little before he strayed off to a clover patch on the highway below. Twilight deepened to darkness. Darkness quickened at last to stars. It was Night, real Night, black alike in meadow, wood, and dooryard, before the Girl opened her eyes again. Part of an orange moon, waning, wasted, decadent, glowed dully in the sky.