Her fear drove her, and she went up the hill at an impossible pace.
She trembled, staggered, stood still and went on again.
The twilight of the unborn moon was like the horrible twilight of
dreams. She walked as she had walked in nightmares, with knees, weak
as water, that sank under her at every step.
She passed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree. The
schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart. She remembered the
shining night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.
The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as
from a thing that simply could not be. The idea by which she lived
asserted itself against the menace of destruction. It was not so much
an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable. It had behind it
the wisdom and the persistence of life. It refused to believe where
belief meant death to it.
She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He
never met them."
* * * * *
She had passed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers,
sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of
the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the
hill.
She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades. She
was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder
than that wisdom of the blood. She had the sense that what was
happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades,
had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen
that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.
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