abomination; and the river, livid, white, a monstrous thing, crawled,
dragging with it the very slime.

All this she perceived in a flash, when she had turned the corner. It
sank into stillness and grew dim; she was aware of it only as the scene,
the region in which one thing, her terror, moved and hunted her. Among
sounds of the rustling of leaves, and the soft crush of grass, and the
whirring of little wings in fright, she heard it go; it went on the
other side of the hedge, a little way behind her as she skirted the
wood. She stood still to let it pass her, and she felt that it passed,
and that it stopped and waited. A terrified bird flew out of the hedge,
no further than a fledgling's flight in front of her. And in that place
it flew from she saw Harding Powell.

He was crouching under the hedge as she had crouched when she had hidden
from him. His face was horrible, but not more horrible than the Terror
that had gone behind her; and she heard herself crying out to him,
"Harding! Harding!" appealing to him against the implacable, unseen
Pursuer.

He had risen (she saw him rise), but as she called his name he became
insubstantial, and she saw a Thing, a nameless, unnameable, shapeless
Thing, proceeding from him. A brown, blurred Thing, transparent as dusk
is, that drifted on the air. It was torn and tormented, a fragment
parted and flung off from some immense and as yet invisible cloud of
horror. It drifted from her; it dissolved like smoke on the hillside;
and the Thing that had born and begotten it pursued her.

She bowed under it, and turned from the edge of the wood, the horrible
place it had been born in; she ran before it headlong down the field,
trampling the young corn under her feet. As she ran she heard a voice in
the valley, a voice of amazement and entreaty, calling to her in a sort
of song.

"What--are--you--running for--Aggy--Aggy?"

It was Milly's voice that called.

Then as she came, still headlong, to the river, she heard Harding's
voice saying something, she did not know what. She couldn't stop to
listen to him, or to consider how he came to be there in the valley,
when a minute ago she had seen him by the edge of the wood, up on the
very top of the hill.

He was on the bridge--the Farm bridge--now. He held out his hand to
steady her as she came on over the swinging plank.

She knew that he had led her to the other side, and that he was
standing there, still saying something, and that s