vision of the honours and delights that
would welcome her at her journey's end;--so rapt, that she and the
donkey had been for some little time in one of the narrow paths of the
wood before she missed her two conductors.

It caused Mrs. Peckaby to pull the bridle, and cry "Wo-ho!" to the
donkey. She had an idea that they might have struck into the wrong path,
for this one appeared to be getting narrower and narrower. The wood was
intersected with paths, but only a few of them led right through it. She
pulled up, and turned her head the way she had come, but was unable to
distinguish anything, save that she was in the heart of the wood.

"Be you behind, gentlemen?" she called out.

There was no reply. Mrs. Peckaby waited a bit, thinking they might have
lagged unwittingly, and then called out again, with the like result.

"It's very curious!" thought Mrs. Peckaby.

She was certainly in a dilemma. Without her conductors, she knew no more
how to get to New Jerusalem than she did how to get to the new moon. She
might find her way through the wood, by one path or another; but, once
on the other side, she had no idea which road to turn the donkey
to--north, south, east, or west. She thought she would go back and look
after them.

But there was some difficulty in doing this. The path had grown so
narrow that the donkey could not easily be turned. She slipped off him,
tied the bridle to a tree, and ran back as fast as the obscurity of the
path allowed her, calling out to the gentlemen.

The more she ran and the more she called, the less did there appear to
be anybody to respond to it. Utterly at a nonplus, she at length
returned to the donkey--that is, to the spot, so far as she could judge,
where she had left it. But the donkey was gone.

Was Mrs. Peckaby awake or asleep? Was the past blissful dream--when she
was being borne in triumph to New Jerusalem--only an imaginary one? Was
her present predicament real! Which _was_ imagination and which was
real? For the last hour she had been enjoying the realisation of all her
hopes; now she seemed no nearer their fruition than she had been a year
ago. The white donkey was gone, the conducting brothers were gone, and
she was alone in the middle of a wood, two miles from home, on a wet
night. Mrs. Peckaby had heard of enchantments, and began to think she
must have been subjected to something of the sort.

She rubbed her eyes; she pinched her arms. Was she in her senses or not?