“You may tell him if you like,” retorted Dick, and then he whistled out loud and clapped his hands at the baby, which thereupon laughed ecstatically, and almost sprang from its mother’s arms. The keeper’s wife relaxed, and mentally resolved to make no allusion to Dick’s unorthodox sentiments in conversing with her husband. Jim himself had said that it wouldn’t be so bad if folks only kept to rabbits, and Dick had intimated that he would never care to touch anything else. A body should not be too hard, she reflected, on a poor fellow who had no home, so to speak; why, he was almost like a wild creature of the woods himself, living out in all weathers, sleeping often under the stars, picking up a chance meal as he best could--there was no great wonder if he had become as lawless as the four-footed “varmint” against whom the keepers waged such fierce war. One evening, shortly before the great shoot was to take place, Jim came home to tea in a state of contained excitement. When the meal was over he went to the door, and began, to his wife’s surprise, to examine the fastenings carefully. “’Tis a good stout bolt,” he remarked, “and the lock be a new ’un. I d’ ’low if house was shut up you wouldn’t be afeard to bide alone in it?” Betty immediately demonstrated the presence of mind which she would be likely to display under such circumstances by uttering a loud scream. “Oh, Jim, Jim!” she cried, “why be goin’ to stop out all night? I do know so well as if you did tell me that you be goin’ into danger.” “Danger!” cried the keeper, thumping his great chest, “not much fear o’ that! There, don’t ye be so foolish. Me and Stubbs be a-goin’ over t’other side o’ the park down to the river to see to that ’ere decoy for duck, as squire be so set on puttin’ to rights. ’Tis five mile away; we be like to be kep’ late, very late--till daybreak, most like; but do you make the house fast, old ’ooman, and no harm ’ull come to either of us.” Had Betty not been so much absorbed in the main issue, she might have detected something improbable about the keeper’s story; but, as it was, her fears for him were almost lost in the horror of being left all night alone in that desolate spot. Jim, however, jested at her terrors, and himself made the round of the cottage, fastening the casements and securing the seldom-used front door. He stood outside the threshold while she drew the bolts and locked the back one. “Get to thy bed early,” he called to her. “Go to sleep so fast as thou can; and first thing thou knows thou’lt hear me knockin’ to be let in.” But somebody else knocked before Betty had any thought of going to bed; before, indeed, she had finished washing up the tea-things. “Who’s that?” cried she, thrusting a scared face out of the window. “It’s me, Mrs. Whittle--Dick Tuffin. I’ve a-brought ye back your hamper what I promised to mend for ye. Why, ye be shut up very early, bain’t ye?”