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 though it had to be with an agonising slowness. How different it all was, she thought, from that fairy-chariot driving with Him in the morning. The road then seemed straight and level, and movement was an undiluted pleasure! For an instant she closed her wearied eyes as she sighed at the change—and ran off the road-bed.

Happily she was going slowly and recovered herself before more than the front wheels were on the rough mass of old road-scrapings. In a couple of seconds she had backed off and was under way again. She was preternaturally keen now in her outlook. She felt the strain acutely; for the road seemed to be always curving away from her. Moreover there was another cause of concern. Night was coming on. Even in the densest mist or the blackest fog the light or darkness of the sky is to some degree apparent. Now the sense came on her that over the thick mist was darkness. She stopped a moment and getting out looked at her watch in the light of the lamps.

Her heart fell away, away. It was now close to eight o'clock. There was no use worrying she felt; nothing to be done but to go on, carefully for the present. When she made up her mind to the worst, her courage began to come back and she could think. She felt that as the wind was now strongly in her face she must be nearing the Firth, and that in time she would pass the Border and be heading for home and father. She jumped into her seat and was off again.

The fog—she realised now that it was not mist but fog—was thicker than ever; the wind being strongly in her face, it seemed above the glare of the powerful lamps, to come boiling up out of the roadway which she could see but dimly. Fear, vague and gaunt, began to overshadow her. But there was no use worrying or thinking of anything except the immediate present which took the whole of her thought and attention. In the face of her surroundings she dared not go fast, dared not stop. And so for a time