The autumn evening was very beautiful now; bright stars were shining so closely overhead that it seemed as if one could almost touch them with a fishing-rod. Besides, a big, nearly round moon had managed to scramble up behind the bank of blue clouds in the east--a big, fat face of a moon that appeared to be bursting with half-concealed merriment as it blinked across the moor. It wasn't the lollies that had enabled Lotty to regain her good spirits; but she felt quietly happy sitting here on the stone beside this newly found friend. Oh yes, he was going to be a friend; she felt certain of that already. Young though Lottie was, she had a woman's instinct. Perhaps she possessed a woman's pride as well, though only in embryo; for she felt half-ashamed of her awkward, bare brown legs that ended not in shoes but rough sandals, and of the pretty necklace of crimson hips and haws that she had strung for herself only yesterday. They had been sitting in silence for some time, both thinking, I suppose, when Lotty's keen ear caught the weary call of some benighted plover. 'They'll soon be away now!' she sighed, more to herself than to her companion. 'What will soon be away, Lotty?' 'Oh, the plovers and the swallows and the greenfinches, and nearly all my pretty pets of springtime, and we'll have only just the rooks and the gulls left.' Antony laid his hand on hers. 'Lotty loves the wild birds, then?' 'I--I suppose so. Doesn't everybody? I wish I could go south with the birds in autumn, to lands where the flowers are always blooming.' 'Who knows what is before you, child!' The child interested him. 'Look, Lotty, look!' cried Antony next moment; 'what on earth can that be?' He was genuinely startled. About two hundred yards from the place where they sat a great ball of crimson-yellow fire, as big as a gipsy pot, rose slowly, waveringly, into the air. It was followed by five others, each one smaller than the one above it. They switched themselves towards the forest, and one by one they went out. 'It is only will-o'-the-wisps,' said Lotty, 'and they always bring good luck. Aren't you glad?' 'Very,' said Antony. Then, hand in hand, as if very old acquaintances indeed, they resumed their journey. And, as they got nearer and nearer to the forest, the tall pine-trees, with brown, pillar-like limbs, grew higher and higher, and finally swallowed them up. CHAPTER II. HOW ANTONY HAPPENED TO BE THERE. Antony Blake--or Frank Antony Blake, to give him the benefit of his full tally--was the only son and heir-apparent of Squire Blake of Manby Hall, a fine old mansion away down in Devonshire; thousands of acres of land--no one seemed to know how many--rolling fields of meadow-lands divided by hedgerows and waving grain, woods and wolds, lakes and streams, and an upland of heath and fern that lost itself far away on the nor'-western horizon.