Was Jim ahead or behind? There was no time to study. Her mind was in no condition to reason; there was only the feverish urge that forced her on. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” She turned up the track, now trying pitifully to run, now wavering, staggering, but always persevering.
How black it was! She strained her eyes forward. He might be near, very near, yet she could not see him, and any moment her strength might fail.
She demanded yet another effort from the forces so near exhaustion. “Jim!” she cried, shrilly, wildly. “Jim! Jim! Wait, oh, wait!”
A hundred yards up the track Jim heard the cry, stopped, listened.
“Jim, wait!” It sounded more faintly. A woman’s voice, here, calling his name! There was but one woman in Diversity who had ever called him Jim.
In this moment, a moment he knew was weighted with danger to him, came her voice out of the black mystery that lay behind him. It was startling, unbelievable. He asked himself if much worry, much travail of heart, had not deranged some spring or cog in his imagination, so that he heard things which were not. If it really were Marie, what was she doing there? She had betrayed him once; was this another act in tune with her betrayal? He braced himself against a fresh danger, an unforeseen danger, and waited.
She tottered up to him out of the black blanket of night; tottered, hands fumbling before her, his name on her lips, his name and that other word which her will had set there so that it was repeated endlessly without volition: “Jim, hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
Her fingers touched him before she was aware of his presence; touched him, clung to him. She cried aloud, inarticulately. Panting, sobbing, she tried to speak, but only repeated over and over that one word: “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
He felt her fingers slipping from him, felt her body sagging, falling. His arm passed round her, sustaining her. Her head sank in the hollow of her arm and she sighed with weary contentment.
But he shook her, not roughly, but with boyish impatience, boyish alarm.
“No, no! Why are you here? What is the matter?”
Her mind cleared slowly; her will that had set on one determination, to reach him—set so it could not loose its hold—relaxed. She breathed deeply, pushed against him in an effort to stand free.