nd watched her go, for I dared not
follow. The ride stretched away as straight as a line for four or five
hundred yards, a green path between green walls. To enter it was to be
immediately detected, if she turned, while the thicket itself permitted
no passage. I stood baffled and raging, and watched her pass along. It
seemed an age before she at last reached the end, and, turning sharply
to the right, was in an instant gone from sight.

I waited then no longer. I started off, and, running as lightly and
quietly as I could, I sped down the green alley. The sun shone into
it, the trees kept off the wind, and between heat and haste I sweated
finely. But the turf was soft, and the ground fell slightly, and in
little more than a minute I gained the end. Fifty yards short of the
turning I stopped, and, stealing on, looked cautiously the way she had
gone.

I saw before me a second ride, the twin of the other, and a hundred
and fifty paces down it her grey figure tripping on between the green
hedges. I stood and took breath, and cursed the wood and the heat
and Madame's wariness. We must have come a league, or two-thirds of a
league, at least. How far did the man expect her to plod to meet him?
I began to grow angry. There is moderation even in the cooking of eggs,
and this wood might stretch into Spain, for all I knew!

Presently she turned the corner and was gone again, and I had to repeat
my manoeuvre. This time, surely, I should find a change. But no! Another
green ride stretched away into the depths of the forest, with hedges of
varying shades--here light and there dark, as hazel and elder, or thorn,
and yew and box prevailed--but always high and stiff and impervious.
Halfway down the ride Madame's figure tripped steadily on, the only
moving thing in sight. I wondered, stood, and, when she vanished,
followed-only to find that she had entered another track, a little
narrower but in every other respect alike.

And so it went on for quite half an hour. Sometimes Madame turned to
the right, sometimes to the left. The maze seemed to be endless. Once or
twice I wondered whether she had lost her way, and was merely seeking to
return. But her steady, purposeful gait, her measured pace, forbade the
idea. I noticed, too, that she seldom looked behind her--rarely to
right or left. Once the ride down which she passed was carpeted not with
green, but with the silvery, sheeny leaves of some creeping plant that
in the distance had a