Read The Shadow for Free Online Page B

moor. All that went through my head like lightning.
    We are looking for someone—we have reason to believe he may be somewhere about, he said. As I had nothing to say he looked me over and added, You are staying at Greenbank with Mrs. Robertson? I said Yes. Then he asked me, Have you been far? I said I had been to the Altfey burn. The grey eyes considered me. It might be as well, he suggested, if you were more careful; he may be a bit off his head.
    I had to move, but in going over the fence I stumbled badly. He at once supported me, kept me on my feet. I didn’t mean to frighten you, he said.
    I was trembling and he made to accompany me. I gathered all my resources, thanked him, and smiled. I went on, knowing that if I let go he would be by my side. I shut everything out of my mind except the queer discovery I had made. I hung onto that as to a rope. Remember my telling you in the letter about the thistledown how my imagination produced the face of a schoolmaster with thistledown eyes? It was the policeman’s face. He is the policeman in the village of Elver, over two miles away. Once Aunt Phemie and I passed him there. Aunt Phemie greeted him. He had looked at me then in the way policemen do. Only that once, and I had forgotten him entirely—until I saw his grey eyes by the wood.
    When I went to earth I was pretty bad, Ranald. It was a touch of hysteria. I let go only for a minute or two. I fought my best. I was desperately afraid the policeman would come on me. But I kept the bits together. And strangely enough it was not so much what I had just been through as that last spell in London—up it came again.
    You would think I had had enough for one day. I was now quite damp with sweat. But when I felt for my hankie to clear my eyes I found I hadn’t got it. I had lost it. The last time I could remember using it was just after I had entered the gorge. It had been warm walking in the sun. I could remember crushing it in my hand. It’s a small square of linen with my initials hand-stitched in one corner. I need not tell you how I imagined its being picked up by the man in the gorge. A curious thing to find in his pocket on being searched. I felt trussed.
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    I couldn’t finish that last letter. My pen wouldn’t make any more writing. I can’t even read it over. To muff such an opportunity of a dramatic finish, too! We were so merry this afternoon, Aunt Phemie and myself. Aunt Phemie is a darling. You’ll love her. I took her in hand over some old frocks of hers. I told her she was becoming dowdy and a perfect fright. How can she expect to impress Will, I asked, if she does not appear at least once in the day as the lady of the manor. For it is really quite a decent farmhouse. All of five bedrooms and an enormous bathroom which may have been another bedroom once. I can’t say I ever liked pitch pine. I think it is because when I was tiny and went to church first, the tall straight-backed pews—like stalls—and the pulpit and the steps up to it and everything except the whitewashed walls were pitch pine. Everyone was so silent and strange, too, and when—being about six—you had to say something and whispered, you were shushed by so solemn a face that for the first time you realised the awfulness of guilt and crime. Yet deep in your little heart you did not believe it and rebelled, for you knew that the crime and the guilt were outside you, like something in the air and not in you. They were in this awful large place, the church, and you looked up under your brows, and down, and you wanted to go away home and you felt the tears surging up. Before the wail could come out a sweet was put in your hand and you fought the good fight because in a vague way you realised the kind bribery of that sweet. Not that it altered anything. Yet the pitch pine is, I think, a more particular memory, because one Sunday I found that by pressing my hot little hand against the wood, I could