If ever she had felt herself helpless, it was in this moment passing along the half-lit, half-empty city street. By what she knew, by what she wore around her neck, she was separated from all peace-abiding citizens--she was outlawed. Every closed door and shaded window (so many she had opened or looked out of!) now seemed shut and shaded against her for ever. Night and the reticent gray city, averting their eyes, let her slip through unregarded.
She was passing that section of large, old-fashioned mansions, cupolaed, towered, indistinct at the top of their high, broad steps, or back among the trees of their gardens. Along the front of one stretched a high hedge of laurestinas black as a ribbon of the night, capacious of shadows; and it seemed to Flora that all at once a shadow detached itself. She looked with a start. It flashed along the pavement--if shadow it were--running head down with a strange, scattering movement of arms and legs, yet seeming to make such speed that for a moment it kept abreast of the cab. She could see no features, no lineament of this strange thing to recognize, yet instantly she knew what it must be--what she had feared and thought impossible. She thrust her head far out and addressed the driver.
"Go as fast as you can, faster! and I'll give you twice what he gave you." The words rang so wildly to her own ears that she half expected the driver to peer down like an old bird of prey from his perch and demand her reason. But he made no sound or sign. It may have been that in his time he had heard even wilder requests than hers. He only sent his whip cracking forward to the ears of the lean horse, and the cab began to rattle like a mad thing.
Flora leaned back with a sigh of relief. The mere sensation of being borne along at such a rate, the sight of houses, lamp-posts, even people here and there, flitting away from the eye, unable to interrupt her course, or even to glimpse her identity, gave her a feeling of safety. The more she was getting into the residence part of the city, the more deserted the streets, the closer shut the windows of the houses, the more it seemed to her as if the night itself covered and abetted her flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky, moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp--the only living thing in sight. It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in front of her, waiting for her, who had driven so fast--too fast, it had seemed, for human foot to follow. By what unimaginable route had he traveled? She was ready to believe he had flown over the housetops. And above all other horrors, why was he pursuing her?