18At four o'clock that afternoon Janice came hurrying down the track from Prior's End. She was not conscious of hurrying. She was not really conscious of her body at all, only of immeasurable disaster and the need she had to find Garth. She was bare-headed, and her white dress was too thin for the day, which had turned suddenly bleak, as days are apt to do in an English September.
She came into the village street, found it alive with children, and remembered with a kind of shock that it was Saturday afternoon. When something violent and abnormal has jolted your world out of focus, it is difficult to realize that life is going on quite normally for other people.
As she crossed the road she almost ran into Mrs Mottram, who immediately clutched her and said,
"Darling, how dreadful! Don't t
