children
and dogs before him as he came. She felt a wild amusement at the
thought, but her face did not relax its tense sternness.

She tightened her grip on the wheel, working the car to the left,
preparing for the turn, and put on her brakes hard enough to lock the
back wheels, expecting to feel the quick sideways slip of a skidding
car. Instead there was a terrific impact--the crash of steel and glass,
a cry. Her own car shot out of her control, turning a complete circle,
bounded off the road and on again, and came slowly to a standstill,
pointing in the same direction as before, but some yards beyond the fork
in the road. She looked about her. Fragments of the motorcycle were
strewn from the corner to where in a ditch at the foot of a telegraph
pole the man was lying, a featureless mass.

[Illustration: IT WAS A VERY TERRIFYING MOMENT FOR LYDIA.]

She leaped out of her car. Amid the wreckage of the motorcycle the clock
stared up at her like a little white face. The world seemed to have
become silent; her feet beating on the cement as she ran made the only
sound. The man lay motionless. He was bent together and strangely
twisted like a boneless scarecrow thrown down by the winds. An arm was
under him, his eyes were closed, blood was oozing from his mouth. She
stooped over him, trying to lift his body into a more natural position;
but he was a large man, and she could do nothing with him. She looked up
from the struggle and found to her astonishment that she was no longer
alone. People seemed to have sprung from the earth, the air was full of
screams and explanations. A large touring car had come to a standstill
near by. She vaguely remembered having passed it. A flivver was panting
across the road. Everyone was asking questions, which she did not stop
to answer. The important thing was to get the man into the touring car
and take him to the hospital.

She was so absorbed in all his that her own connection with the
situation did not enter her mind. As she sat in the back of the car
supporting his body, the blood stiffening on her own dark clothes, she
thought only of her victim. She was not the type of egotist who thinks
always, "How terrible that this should have happened to me!"

She said to herself: "He probably has a wife and children. It would have
been better if I had been the one to be killed."

Arrived at the hospital, she followed him into the ward where the
stretcher carried him, and waited outside the