It passed. It was a man--in a white suit. Just an ordinary man. No, not ordinary. The ordinary man in France does not wear white. Nor in England, except for boating and tennis and-Flannels. Yes. The lunatic who boiled his brains in the sun!
Betty's terror changed colour as the wave changes from green to white, but it lost not even so much of its force as the wave loses by the change. It held her moveless till the soft step of the tennis shoes died away. Then softly and hardly moving at all, moving so little that not a leaf of those friendly bushes rustled, she slipped off her shoes: took them in her hand, made one leap through the crackling, protesting undergrowth and fled back along the road, fleet as a greyhound.
She ran and she walked, very fast, and then she ran again and never once did she pause to look or listen. If the lunatic caught her--well, he would catch her, but it should not be her fault if he did.
The trees were thinner. Ahead she saw glimpses of a world that looked quite light, the bridge ahead. With one last spurt she ran across it, tore up the little bit of street, slipped through the door, and between the garden trees to her pavilion.
She looked very carefully in every corner--all was still and empty. She locked the door, and fell face downward on her bed.
Vernon in his studio was "thinking things over" after the advice of Miss Voscoe in much the same attitude.
"Oh," said Betty, "I will never go out at night again! And I will leave this horrible, horrible place the very first thing to-morrow morning!"
But to-morrow morning touched the night's events with new colours from its shining palette.
"After all, even a lunatic has a right to walk out in the forest if it wants to," she told herself, "and it didn't know I was there, I expect, really. But I think I'll go and stay at some other hotel."
She asked, when her "complete coffee" came to her, what the mad gentleman did all day.
"He is not so stupid as Mademoiselle supposes," said Marie. "All the artists are insane, and he, he is only a little more insane than the others. He is not a real mad, all the same, see you. To-day he makes drawings at Montigny."
"Which way is Montigny?" asked Betty. And, learning, strolled, when her coffee was finished, by what looked like the other way.