'It is all folly!' he said dejectedly and with bitterness. 'Why could I not go to India and win diamonds for myself? Much good my calculations and my horoscopes and my hopes and fears have done me! A man may rob in India and be called a hero for it: why am I in England, where robbery is hanging? Here have I stayed, as if I were a rooted tree myself, and have gathered together the legends about this dumb old Oak, and pondered over them, and believed in them, until at last I have come verily to expect that these barren boughs shall drop gold upon me! I will expect it no more. This is the last day that it could have happened. Old demon, thou art a liar and a blockhead! I disbelieve and abjure thee! If ever thou didst have power, it is gone out of thee, never to return. To-morrow I will have thee hacked down, like any other timber, and piled up for use in the kitchen fire. And for my own part, I will cease to wait for the fulfilment of prophecies made by greater fools than myself; I will begin to act, and that to some purpose!' An abrupt, thunderous sound, prolonging itself in softer echoes, seemed to answer him from the shore. A great wave had stolen unobserved through the calm, to fling down its message at the foot of the cliff. Before the echoes had died into silence, a low and hoarse murmur began to come forth from the deepest centre, apparently, of the hitherto silent Oak. With a movement of nervous eagerness, Sir Norman again raised his head and strove to make his glance penetrate the obscurity. The murmur grew in loudness and volume, and the heavy foliage was tumultuously agitated, and anon waved forcibly to and fro, and the branches, though as stalwart, many of them, as ordinary trees, moved and groaned and laboured, as if battling against the onset of a gale. It was an appalling spectacle--this turbulent storm roaring in the dark circumference of the Oak while all the evening round about was still as death. Sir Norman stood there in a mood of mingled awe and exultation. He was beholding what no other living eye had beheld: what none living besides himself, perhaps, had ever dared believe in. The miracle of a century ago was true again to-day. The demon was awake once more and was training his myriad tongues to speech. Sir Norman listened, and his ears were filled with a sound that was, and yet was not, articulate utterance. It spoke to his thought; but then his thought laid hold of it and seemed to be itself the speaker, or at least the shaper, of the word. And when the stormy voice was at its loudest, suddenly it sank into broken whispers and sighings, and soon was altogether hushed. The message had been given. What that message was, Sir Norman only could know.