Together we set our shoulders to the door. It gave way, and we found ourselves in the one tiny living-room of the house. It was dark and close there was a disorder of household things piled here and there. On a small broken rocker in the middle of the floor, Mrs. Menning sat huddled, swaying to and fro, with the low crooning mutter we had heard from outside. She had an old coloured handkerchief tied over her head and a small silver cross was hung on a thin chain round her wrinkled neck. Her aged face was impassive; her eyes, uncannily keen and bright, seemed to look straight through us into distance. "Where is Miss Lessing?" I asked. She made no sign of having heard me, only kept up that faint unintelligible muttering. Herrick went over and shook her gently by the shoulder. "Where is Miss Lessing? You got to tell us." She twisted her shoulder from his grasp and sunk lower into the chair, her eyes averted. My ears had caught a sound overhead. There was no stairway in the room, but behind a pile of furniture a wooden button betrayed a door that I had taken for an ordinary closet. Hastily, I began to drag the things aside. The old woman saw my purpose and slipped with sudden agility to her feet, her eyes blazing with anger, but Herrick thrust her aside and in an instant we had the door open and were upstairs, the dog at our heels. "Mary!" I caught her in my arms--unhurt, thank God--and carried her down, through the shuttered room, past the old muttering woman--out into the open and the clean air. "Oh, Austin, that old woman! She met me on the road--I had gone to call for Dick, and she said she was looking for me; that Dick had had an accident and they'd brought him to this house and sent for me. She told me to go upstairs, that he was there, and she shut the door and wouldn't let me out. There was no window; no one could have heard me from outside. And then Leo found me, I heard him barking and she tried to drive him away, but he wouldn't go. Good old Leo!" She put her arm round the setter, who was trying hard to reach her face with his tongue. "I knew he'd help you to find me. Austin, where _is_ Dick?" I had to tell her, breaking it as gently as I could. "Will you take me to him at once, please--now! Austin, I knew something was going to happen--I felt it. That's why I was worried, last night--I couldn't explain. And then shut up alone there, not knowing what it was.... That old woman--she was dreadful, but she wasn't unkind to me. Do you suppose she _knew_--that she just wanted to get me somewhere safe?" Who knew? Was there perhaps a spark of human feeling in that strange warped soul, half unhinged by her own troubles, something that Mary's chance kindness, that afternoon by the saw-mill, had reached and touched? It might have been.