He walked on, up the hill. He did not know where he was going. He was looking for some point where he could speak to Clare; some point where he could see all about him and know, beyond all possibility of error, whether or not they were observed.
He walked up the steep street. On either side it was lined by small white houses. Their outlines were growing sharper all the time as the pre-dawn greyness encroached upon night.
He found a place, just past the first street intersection which crossed his path up the hill. It was a narrow alleyway between two of the white buildings. He turned into it and stopped. In the whole length of the steep street, he had seen before he left it, were no human figures save himself and Clare.
She joined him. It was much lighter now, and he could see her clearly as she came steadily along, between the high white walls, towards him.
She spoke before he could. She said, in the flat, emotionless voice:
“Why have we come here—to Monterey?”
He was still staring at her. She frightened him.
“It was the furthest place which the bus went,” he said. “And it is not a large place, I think. And perhaps we can go quickly away from it and into some wild country and find a place to hide. If we do this for one week. . . .”
She stopped him. She said, as if he were not speaking:
“I know Monterey. Very well. And the country. I think somewhere we could hide very well. If it hasn’t changed.”
He said: “Where is it?” and asked her nothing more.
“It’s about three miles,” she said. She was looking straight into his eyes, and he saw that over her eyes was a sort of polished shield of blankness.
“You follow,” she said—and turned away from him and walked out from between the white walls.
For an hour which seemed like six he followed the steady, stiff little figure as it walked, with unvarying pace and gait, up the hills and out of the white small town. He did not think it strange to be following her thus blindly. Sometimes he was only thirty yards behind it, at others he deemed it wise to be as much as a hundred. But she never turned her head. She walked on. If he had not known this was Clare; if the back which he followed had been pointed out to him as Clare’s back and he had not seen her face, he would have denied that this was Clare. The free, lovely, synchronized swing of the lithe body was gone—as the life and feeling had gone from the soft deep voice. He felt fear again—fear and other, tenderer emotions which clutched him by the throat and frightened him the more.
She led him up and up and away from the white buildings and along barren hillside roads. The greyness paled and became the bright hard light of dawn. They left the yellowing hillsides and were on the plateau behind the peninsula, and there was greenness everywhere about them, as far as a man could see. Green grass and green growing things and the darker, more ominous green of the trees—cypress and spruce, fir and pine. . . .
They came on to a main road, and Otto crossed to the other side of it and increased his distance from the implacable, steadily moving back and covertly scanned each of the few vehicles which passed them and was again satisfied—with an increase of the weird fear that such satisfaction gave him—that no one of them was other than it seemed.
She struck off the main road and climbed a gate and was lost in a forest of tall, dark pines. He hastened, since there was nothing which could see him upon the road, and vaulted the gate himself and plunged into the chill shadow of the trees and saw her, still walking ahead of him with no alteration in pace or stride or carriage, along an aisle between the harsh, straight boles.
He followed—and near the edge of the trees, when he could see beyond them bright sunshine golden upon feather-tipped wild grass, she halted.
She turned to face him, waiting.
He drew level with her and she turned and pointed ahead, off to their right, through the thinning trees.
“Look!” she said. “That’s the place I meant.”
He followed the pointing finger with his eyes and saw a house. It seemed to be in a bay made by the curving outline of the limits of the fir-wood.
It was black and gaunt and sprawling in the hard early light. It had an air of indescribable desolation. Around it wild grass and high weeds flourished in a mess of gold and green and brown which despite the colour was ugly to the eye. It was a clumsy shape—a disproportioned
She said: “It’s been here, like that, since I was a child of fourteen. Some old Spanish people had it. Somewhere, there’s someone who owns it—and the land around. But he won’t sell it—or have it touched. People say he’s mad. The Spanish people in Monterey have a name for the whole place—they call it