She thought, too, about Mary O’Shaughnessy without another woman near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle.  Things were always so much worse in the darkness.  And perhaps she might be going to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!

Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church clock far down in the village struck nine.  And with the chiming of the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty seconds of age was a determination.

In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a motor veil over her hair.  The indignation at the defection of the hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her movements.  In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.

The front doors were unlocked.  Outside there was faint starlight, the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the village.

Jane paused at the drive and took a breath.  Then at her best gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she started to run.  At the sundial she left the drive and took to the lawn gleaming with the frost of late October.  She stopped running then and began to pick her way more cautiously.  Even at that she collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and feeling her nose.  It was distinctly scratched and swollen.  No one would think her beautiful with a nose like that!

She had not expected the wire fence.  It was impossible to climb and more difficult to get under.  However, she found one place where the ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most undignified fashion.  It is perfectly certain that had Jane’s family seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O’Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational.  But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her spoiled young life.

Jane never told the details of that excursion.  Those that came out in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences, and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate.  But as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow——­

Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a thief to the telephone.  There were more rustlings and creakings and rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after her.  But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called up her father in the city.