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I must get out, she thought: I must get out into the fresh air, I must get out into the cool rain. …
    Carlyon appeared in the doorway of the sitting room, and now she was hemmed in by the three of them. Menacing, sinister, they advanced imperceptibly upon her. Dai Jones’s grey eyes were pools of ugly secrets, the woman’s smiling face was a pink and white mask, painted over evil; and Carlyon—Carlyon was after all the fortune hunter that she had laughed about in the security and saneness of her little pink office; a fortune hunter, a murderer, a destroyer of helpless young creatures for the sake of sordid gain. …
    And suddenly there was Mr. Chucky! Sane, cool, so very reassuring and real, with his precise manner and his ramrod back—friend of a thousand aeons, compared with these three terrible strangers. She threw out a hand to him, caught at his hard brown hand as a drowning man might catch at a spar of wood. “Oh, Mr. Chucky—thank God, there you are! You know her, don’t you? You know that Amista really is here, you know her, you said how pretty she was and that Mr. Carlyon—yes, Mr. Carlyon, now I remember, he said that you thought so, you thought she was pretty. So you do know her, you are married to her, just like I said!” Let them look now as menacing as they would; at least she was sane, there was no longer need to doubt her own senses, to reel bewildered beneath shocks that seemed to come from her own mind. “You know Amista, don’t you, Mr. Chucky; you know Mrs. Carlyon?”
    Mr. Chucky leaned indolently against the frame of the doorway. His lean fingers played with an unlighted cigarette. “Me? I never heard of the lady, Miss Jones. I didn’t even know Mr. Carlyon was married.”
    She turned and stumbled out of the hall, into the silver rain.

CHAPTER THREE
    S HE WAS OUTSIDE IN the fresh air and the clean rain, walking swiftly away from that horrible house, breaking into a run, fleeing down the steep little path as though the fiends of hell were after her. Far below, like a curled leaf on the bosom of the river, the milk-woman’s boat pulled steadily across, and she saw the tiny figure detach itself and start up the narrow grey ribbon of the road on the opposite side of the valley. She wanted to scream out, to implore the little woman to come back and take her across to safety and sanity, away from the terror and mystery of that horrible house. But she knew it was useless: Miss Evans the Milk was far, far beyond hearing, steadily ploughing up the steep hillside, every step taking her farther and farther away. She ran on wildly, aimlessly, sobbing for breath, not knowing or caring what she should do when she came to the river’s edge, intent only upon getting as far as possible away from the house. Then she caught her high heel in a root that straggled across the path, and fell full length and lay with her head against her arm.
    For a moment it seemed as though she would never again have strength to rise; the temptation was sweet and strong to give up all effort, to remain there lying in the mud, to surrender herself to weariness, to inertia, to nothingness—not to try any more, not to be frightened any more. But she pulled herself together and scrambled to her feet and, leaning back against a boulder, tore out a handful of rough grass and began to wipe off her mud-stained mackintosh and shoes. Her right ankle ached a little; she must have twisted it as she fell.
    The house was no longer in sight. Across the valley the little town straggled along its main street, a line of grey, chalked abruptly across the breast of the opposite mountain. She contrived to light a cigarette and managed a few puffs before the rain extinguished it. Her spirits rose, she became a little ashamed of her precipitate flight from the house. For after all, what had happened that could possibly drive one to such a silly panic? Nothing, really, that her own imagination might not have imposed upon reality. It suddenly came