As I set out I saw that the moon was rapidly sinking. Much time had been lost, and I must needs make haste. I hurried past the whin bush, and by-and-by came to the bed of brackens. Just as I reached it the moon sank, but there was still enough light to let me see dimly things near at hand. I judged that the river must lie about a mile away, and to walk that distance over unknown ground in the dark tests a man in a hundred ways. I did not know at what moment some lurking figure might spring upon me from the shelter of the brackens, and, clapping a hand on my shoulder, arrest me in the King’s name. I had no weapon of defence save a stout heart and a pair of iron fists. Even a brave man, in flight, is apt to read into every rustle of a leaf or into every one of the natural sounds that come from the sleeping earth an eerie significance, and more than once I halted and crouched down to listen closely to some sound, which proved to be of no moment. Conscience is a stern judge who speaks most clearly in the silences of the night when a man is alone, and as I groped my way onward the relentless pursuing voice spoke in my ear like some sibilant and clinging fury of which I could not rid myself. The avenger of blood was on my heels: some ghostly warlock, some awesome fiend sent from the pit to take me thither! The horror of the deed in which I had taken part in the morning gripped me by the heart. I stumbled on distraught, and as I went I remembered how once I had heard among the hills a shrill cry as of a child in pain, and looking to see whence the cry had come I saw dragging itself wearily along the hillside, with ears dropped back and hind-limbs paralysed with fear, a young rabbit, and as I looked I saw behind it a weasel trotting briskly, with nose up and gleaming eyes, in the track of its victim. I knew enough of wood-craft to realise that the chase had lasted long and that from the time the weasel began the pursuit until the moment when I saw them, the issue had been certain; and I knew that the rabbit knew. Such tricks of fancy does memory play upon a man in sore straits. I saw, again, the end of the chase--the flurry of fur as the weasel gripped the rabbit by the throat; I heard its dying cry as the teeth of its pursuer closed in the veins of its neck; and there in the dark, I was seized with sudden nausea. I drew a long breath and tried to cry aloud, but my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth; fear had robbed me of speech. Then a sudden access of strength came to me and I began to run. Was it only the fevered imaginings of a disordered brain, or was it fact, that to my racing feet the racing feet of some pursuer echoed and echoed again? Suddenly my foot struck a boulder. I was thrown headlong and lay bruised and breathless on the ground--and as I lay the sound of footsteps that had seemed so real to me was no more heard.