reassure herself, she remembered that
in a cross-hall she had noted the telephone, the wire still intact, as
she knew, for the connection of the hotel was with that of the bungalow
on a party-line of the exchange at Shaftesville, twenty miles away. If
she should be really frightened, she could in one moment call up the
house across the ravine.

The next instant she was almost palsied with recurrent terror: the
footfall, stealthy, shuffling, weighty, sounded again. It was never the
echo of her own deft, light step! A distinct, sibilant whisper suddenly
hissed with warning throughout the place, and as she turned with the
instinct of flight she caught a glimpse in the darkling mirror across the
dining-room of a fugitive speeding figure, then another, and still
another, all frantically, noiselessly fleeing--why or whom, she could not
descry, she did not try to discriminate.

Without a word or a sound--her voice had deserted her--she turned
precipitately and fled in the opposite direction through the corridor,
down a cross-hall, and burst out of a side door upon a porch that was the
nearest outlet from the building. This porch was less intended as an
exit, however, than an outlook. True, there were steps that led down at
one side to the ground, but the descent thence was so steep, so rugged
and impracticable, that obviously no scheme of utility had prompted its
construction. Jagged outcropping ledges, a chaos of scattered boulders,
now and again a precipitous verge showing a vertical section of the
denuded strata, all formed a slant so precarious and steep that with the
sharp sound of the door, closing on its spring, Bayne looked up from his
seat in the swing on the veranda across the ravine in blank amazement to
see her there essaying the descent, as if in preference to an exit by the
safe and easy method of the winding road at the front of the edifice.

Lillian, still with all the impetus of terror in her muscles, her breath
short and fluttering, her eyes distended and unseeing, plunged wildly
down the rugged, craggy declivity, painfully aware of his wonder as he
gazed from the distance, prefiguring, too, his disapproval. Perhaps this
had its unnerving influence, though swift and surefooted ordinarily, her
ankle turned amidst the gravel shifting beneath her flying steps, and she
sank suddenly to the ground, slipped down a precipitous incline, caught
herself, half crouching against a gigantic boulder.

There was no recou