The miles fleeted past, until the engine and its pent scream burst forth from the clanging walls of a rock cutting, and skirting a lake, entered on the great brown plain of Tully bog. A double line of drains, fed by innumerable cuts, made a herring-bone pattern on either side; the spongy gravel sprang beneath the strides of the engine; the water in the drains flapped and washed in sympathy against its peat walls. It seemed a singular audacity of engineering to force a line of rails across such a morass. Three miles away the heights of Cahirdreen were dark in the evening sky; recognizing them, Slaney felt the influence of an evil fate cross her keen excitement like a cold streak--like a shiver across the heat of fever. The driver looked at his watch, and, with one hand on the brake, added the last possible five miles an hour to the pace. The engine seemed to be swallowing the endless strip of line that flowed into its clutch; the motion felt like sliding on a wire, without effort or possibility of stopping. Thundering along an imperceptible curve, they neared the hill, with its fir-trees ranged in tall and quiet ranks in the twilight. At a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, the cutting opened before them as they rounded the bend, and all four uttered a simultaneous exclamation. The V-shaped cleft held a dark obstruction. Instantly, with a jar and a jerk, the brakes were on at their full power, and Slaney was leaning back as if to hold off the shock that was already sending shoots of anticipation through her feet and fingers. Shouts, and the whistling of another engine came through the noise, the brakes bit, and shoved, and clung. Somewhere in the jolting, deafening seconds an arm came strongly round Slaney’s waist, and drew her towards the footboard. She understood that if the worst came she was to jump with Major Bunbury; then another hand caught her skirt, and pulled her back. She recognized the driver’s filthy white sleeve, and at the same moment some one shouted that they were safe. Squeaking, and grinding, and skidding, the engine was fought to a standstill, while yet ten yards separated it from the buffers of the brake van in which Lady Susan and Glasgow had started an hour before. Fifty yards further on, the line was blocked by a great pile of gravel and rock, newly fallen from the side of the cutting. Lady Susan and Glasgow were there; her face looked wild and white, and as she came to Slaney, she seemed to struggle to speak. It was a moment of extremes and exaggeration in feeling. Slaney felt that two independent currents of supreme and fore-ordained evil had made their onslaught, and, in meeting, had neutralized each other. CHAPTER X