Autumn advanced rapidly that year--a golden luxuriant autumn, ablaze with colour and lavish with fruit. The thorn-trees upon the downs were laden with berries, the bryony flung long graceful tendrils from side to side of the thickets, chains of transparent gold, bearing here a beryl, and there a topaz, and there a coral bead. The blackberry brambles displayed their wealth in more wholesale fashion, for their clusters were now entirely black and now red. The days were still hot enough to cause Robert to throw open coat and shirt-collar when he crossed the down, but the nights were cold; a thick dew coated the grass, almost a white frost. In the secret recesses of the copse, where the sun scarcely penetrated, lay silvery patches by day as well as by night. One afternoon Robert came gaily to the accustomed meeting-place, but found no one there. “I’m a bit early,” he said to himself; “I’ll have a look round and then come back. I think she’ll wait--ah, I reckon she’d wait a bit for me now. She’s gettin’ used to me. I reckon she’s gettin’ to take to me.” Smiling to himself he left the wider track and turned aside into one of the narrower alleys before described. The leaves were yellowing here on either side; and the grass beneath his feet was covered with thick rime. As he edged himself along it, lost in meditation, he suddenly stopped short, gazing fixedly at the ground. Its hoary surface bore traces of recent footsteps: a man’s footsteps--and a woman’s. They stared up at Robert as it seemed to him, and all at once, though he had been glowing with health and happiness a moment before, he fell a-shivering. He knew the little foot that made those tracks--only the week before he had laughed admiringly as he had marked its impression in the dew. A little foot--and a great one side by side with it. A man’s foot! How close they must have walked there in the narrow path! Robert’s shivering fit ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the blood coursed madly through his veins--hot enough now--boiling hot. His fingers closed tightly round his gun and he rushed forward, brushing aside the close-growing branches, on, on, never stopping, yet keeping his eyes fixed all the time upon those tell-tale tracks. Now they were lost in one another, now they were interlaced, now quite distinct and separate, side by side. He stopped short when he came to the junction of the path with the wider one in which it merged, a path which traversed the wood from end to end. Robert cast a hasty glance to left and to right and stood transfixed. Yonder where the green roadway abutted on the down he saw two figures standing out dark against the lambent evening sky--a tall and slender woman, a taller man. As he gazed transfixed he saw the man stoop and gather the woman in his arms; and then the two parted, the man walking away across the grass, the woman turning to the right and disappearing into the wood.