howed that the woman, by some mysterious
intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may
operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect
more than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness,
is needed for striking a blow.

The half-mile stood now before the sick and weary woman like a stolid
Juggernaut. It was an impassive King of her world. The road here
ran across Durnover Moor, open to the road on either side. She
surveyed the wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay down
against a guard-stone of the bridge.

Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller here
exercised hers. Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism,
by which these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassed
by a human being unperceived, was revolved in her busy brain,
and dismissed as impracticable. She thought of sticks, wheels,
crawling--she even thought of rolling. But the exertion demanded
by either of these latter two was greater than to walk erect. The
faculty of contrivance was worn out. Hopelessness had come at last.

"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.

From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge a
portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation
upon the pale white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards the
recumbent woman.

She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness
and it was warmth. She opened her eye's, and the substance touched
her face. A dog was licking her cheek.

He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the
low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position
of her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what
not, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and
mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular
nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal
embodiment of canine greatness--a generalization from what was common
to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from
its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness
endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power,
and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure.

In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier
times she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, who
was as homeless as she