Page:Lolly Willowes - 1926.djvu/180

 beat once more, slowly, slowly; her ears were dizzied with a shrill wall of sound, and her flesh hung on her clammy and unreal. The animal smell that she had noticed when first she entered the room now seemed overwhelming rank. It smelt as if walls and floor and ceiling had been smeared with the juice of bruised fennel.

She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood. She remembered the woods, she remembered her wild cry for help, and the silence that had followed it, as though in ratification. She heard again the mutter of heavy foliage, foliage dark and heavy as the wings of night birds. "No! No!"—she heard the brooding voice—"We will not let you go." At ease, released from her cares, she had walked homeward. Hedge and coppice and solitary tree, and the broad dust-coloured faces of meadow-sweet and hemlock had watched her go by, knowing. The dusk had closed her in, brooding over her. Every shadow, every deepened grove had observed her from under their brows of obscurity. All knew, all could bear witness. Couched within the