Arrived at the top of Clay Lane, the road was crossed, and the donkey was led down a turning towards the lands of Sir Rufus Hautley.  It may have occurred to Mrs. Peckaby to wonder that the highway was not taken, instead of an unfrequented bye-path, that only led to fields and a wood; but, if so, she said nothing.  Had the white donkey taken her to a gravel-pit, and pitched headlong in with her, she would have deemed, in her blind faith, that it was the right road to New Jerusalem.

A long way it was, over those wet fields.  If the brothers and the donkey partook of the saintly nature of the inhabitants of Salt Lake City, possibly they did not find it a weary one.  Mrs. Peckaby certainly did not.  She was rapt in a glowing vision of the honours and delights that would welcome her at her journey’s end;—­so rapt, that she and the donkey had been for some little time in one of the narrow paths of the wood before she missed her two conductors.

It caused Mrs. Peckaby to pull the bridle, and cry “Wo-ho!” to the donkey.  She had an idea that they might have struck into the wrong path, for this one appeared to be getting narrower and narrower.  The wood was intersected with paths, but only a few of them led right through it.  She pulled up, and turned her head the way she had come, but was unable to distinguish anything, save that she was in the heart of the wood.

“Be you behind, gentlemen?” she called out.

There was no reply.  Mrs. Peckaby waited a bit, thinking they might have lagged unwittingly, and then called out again, with the like result.

“It’s very curious!” thought Mrs. Peckaby.

She was certainly in a dilemma.  Without her conductors, she knew no more how to get to New Jerusalem than she did how to get to the new moon.  She might find her way through the wood, by one path or another; but, once on the other side, she had no idea which road to turn the donkey to—­north, south, east, or west.  She thought she would go back and look after them.

But there was some difficulty in doing this.  The path had grown so narrow that the donkey could not easily be turned.  She slipped off him, tied the bridle to a tree, and ran back as fast as the obscurity of the path allowed her, calling out to the gentlemen.

The more she ran and the more she called, the less did there appear to be anybody to respond to it.  Utterly at a nonplus, she at length returned to the donkey—­that is, to the spot, so far as she could judge, where she had left it.  But the donkey was gone.

Was Mrs. Peckaby awake or asleep?  Was the past blissful dream—­when she was being borne in triumph to New Jerusalem—­only an imaginary one?  Was her present predicament real!  Which was imagination and which was real?  For the last hour she had been enjoying the realisation of all her hopes; now she seemed no nearer their fruition than she had been a year ago.  The white donkey was gone, the conducting brothers were gone, and she was alone in the middle of a wood, two miles from home, on a wet night.  Mrs. Peckaby had heard of enchantments, and began to think she must have been subjected to something of the sort.