They waded through the grass back down the hillside. Ahead of them in the thick dusk stood the stone wall of the meadow, but no gate appeared as they followed the meadow’s edge.

“Wait, Em, we must have gotten turned around. The gate’s over there.”

As their fence formed a corner with another stone fence, the gate appeared a few feet from them, white boards gleaming in the dim light. They hurried over to it as another shining purple curtain shook across the sky, and swinging the gate shut, they sped up the little road before them.

A couple of minutes later, they stopped short in bewilderment. Another stone fence blocked their path. But how was this possible? They should be at the orchard by now. The two girls climbed a slight rise and looked around in all directions, trying to make out the shapes of trees that marked the orchard. Some faint light still remained. They could see each other’s faces, pale in the deep dusk, but now they couldn’t distinguish the black horizon from the black cloud banks. The lightning, undulating over the swollen masses of the clouds, was distant and too weak to see by. It gleamed silently, first in front and then behind them.

“This makes no sense,” Kate said firmly, thinking over the way they had come. “All we had to do was walk back down the hill, through the gate, and up the orchard path. We’ve missed the gate somehow. There must be two in that meadow, and we hit on the other one. We’ll follow the road back and look for the other gate out of that field, the one that takes us to the orchard.”

With that plan in mind, they started off confidently, but now their light was gone. They found the little road again more by feel than by sight, but it didn’t lead them to a gate. It turned and skirted along another stone wall, went through a tumbled-down gap, and lost itself altogether in a narrow draw.

Again and again, Kate tried desperately to find the right path in the darkness, making them retrace their steps, but each time they did, they lost their old landmarks. Everything seemed to shift in the darkness around them. They had no idea which direction they faced or where home was. They could only tell that they were moving farther and farther from the shelter of the woodlands. The fields were flattening out, and stone fences were becoming rare.