white feather, incontinently turned tail and run away?
Remembrance of that running scorched her, so that more than once,
awakening suddenly in the night, her fair young body was dyed rose-red
with the disgrace of it literally from head to heel. She was bitterly
humiliated by her own poltroonery, ingenuously doubtful as to whether she
could ever quite recover her self-respect; glad that every day put two
hundred miles and more of sea between her and Tom Verity, since he had
witnessed that contemptible fall from grace.

Nevertheless, after her first consternation--in which, to avoid further
speech with him she had sought refuge among the unsavoury seine nets in
the fore-part of Jennifer's ferry-boat--Tom Verity's probable opinion of
her undignified action troubled her far less than the cause of the said
action itself. For exactly what, after all, had so upset her, begetting
imperative necessity of escape? Not the apparent confirmation of that
ugly legend concerning ghostly ponies driven up across The Hard garden
from the shore. From childhood, owing both to temperament and local
influences, her apprehension of things unseen and super-normal had been
remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had
formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that
without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort.
She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell
upon or talk of them.--Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body,
are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer's sixth
sense.--For while, in never doubting their existence her reason
acquiesced, her heart turned away, oppressed and disquieted, as from
other mysterious actualities common enough to human observation, such as
illness, disease, deformity, old age, the pains of birth and of death.
Such matters might perplex and sadden, or arouse her indignant pity; but,
being strong with the confidence of untouched youth and innocence, they
were powerless, in and by themselves, to terrify her to the contemptible
extremity of headlong flight.

This she recognized, though less by reasoning than by instinct; and so
found herself compelled to search deeper for the cause of her recent
disgrace. Not that she willingly prosecuted that search; but that the
subject pursued her, simply refusing to leave her alone. Continually it
presented itself to her mind, and always with the same call for e