At the bend of the track I doubled back, raced up the slope again, to the house. The madness drew me as surely as if it were physical and had an irrevocable grip on me.

The madness had driven a spike into my breastbone and tugged on it I could not leave my Diary.

This is probably the most stupid thing I have ever done in all my not particularly brilliant life. For a book, pages between two covers, I stayed behind when I could have won to freedom. I ran up the track. I jumped over the threshold—my veins were hammering through my skin, I knew this compulsion was suicide but the Diary is by now my inmost friend, it is almost a sense—and to be severed would have been impossible pain. I jumped across the floor, caught my foot in a hollow in the earth, fell on my straw, sent most of it flying, pulled my Diary from the heart of the straw, clutched it to me and leapt again to the doorway.

The jerk had loosened a sandal thong which I had no time to do up. My braids had come down and now even in darkness there was no hope of being mistaken for a boy.

They burst yelling through the door.

I sprang for the rafters, felt the slip of my fingers against the harsh wood, strained unbearably, did an awkward rather unintentional back somersault with a swing of my legs and found

myself in the rustling rafters. The familiar snake slithered past me and in an instant its slithering sound and touch were translated into slithering vision.

Below, Turg’s stick now bore a spitting burden of flames.

I didn’t bother about where he had got this—somewhere outside—as I saw him raise it and the faces around him all turned upwards to follow its illumining with an eager gleam of simultaneous eyes.

The shadows swung away over the rafters. I and the snake made for the still inviolate blackness of the corner. A single footslip between the wooden beams and I’d have been hurtling.

Several voices cried that something had moved up there!

“It was the snake,” said the woman who owns the house. Her voice quavered.

“That’s right, you can see it,” said someone in a disappointed voice.

Huddled in the corner, clutching my Diary, the snake wreathing about me and through my hair, my left sandal steadily falling to bits as the joggled straw thong frayed.

“You be up there, bain’t you?” cried Turg.

I dared hardly to breathe.

“You be up there, traitor-girl, hospitality-thief, bain’t you?” yelled Turg.