freedom! Mamma had warned her--dear Mamma
so far away, so innocent of this terrible disgrace. . . .

Wildly she plunged on through the dark, hoping always for a path but
finding nothing but rough wilderness. She knew no landmarks to guide
her, but down she went determinedly, down, down continually.

An hour had passed. Perhaps two hours. The sky had grown blacker and
blacker. There were occasional gusts of rain. The wind that had been
threshing the tree tops blew with increasing fury.

Jagged tridents of lightning flashed before her eyes. Thunder followed
almost instantly, great crashing peals that seemed to be rending the
heavens.

Maria Angelina felt as if the splinters must fall upon her. It was like
the voice of judgment.

On she went, down, down, through a darkness that was chaos lit by
lightning. Rain came, in a torrent of water, heavy as lead, drenching
her to the skin. Her hair had streamed loose and was plastered about her
face, her throat, her arms. A strand like a wet rope wound about her
wrist and delayed her. Often she slipped and fell.

Still down. But if she should find the Lodge, what then? What would they
think of her, wet, torn, disheveled, an outcast of the night?

She sobbed aloud as she went. She, who had come to America so proudly,
so confidently of glad fortune, who had thought the world a fairy tale
and believed that she had found its prince--what place on earth would
there be for her after this, disgraced and ashamed?

They would ship her back to Mamma at once. And the scandal would travel
with her, whispered by tourists, blazoned by newspapers.

And her family had so counted upon her! They had looked for such great
things!

Now she had utterly blackened their name, tarnished them all forever
with her disrepute. Poor Julietta's hopes would be ruined. . . . No one
would want a Santonini. . . . Lucia would be furious. The Tostis might
even repudiate her--certainly they would inflict their condescension.

She could only disappear, hide in some nursing sisterhood.

So ran her wild thoughts as she scrambled down these endless mountain
sides. All the black fears that she had fought off earlier in the
evening by her belief in Johnny's devotion were upon her now like a pack
of wolves. She wished that she could die at once and be out of it, yet
when she heard the sudden wash of water, almost under her feet, she
jumped aside and screamed.

A river! In the night it looked wider than that one