After dinner, when the Mistress and the Master set off on their usual evening walk, Lad was not on hand to accompany them. As a rule, he was all around them and in front and behind, in a series of gay rushes, as they started on these walks. But not until the Master called him, tonight, did he appear. And then he came up dolorously from the tool-house. Lad did not understand, at all, what was wrong. He knew only that Lady had been shut up in a place she detested and that she was horribly unhappy and that the Master would not let her out. It perplexed him; and it made him increasingly wretched. Not only did he miss his playfully capricious young mate, but her unhappiness made him heartsick. Vainly, he tried to plead with the Master for her release, as the walk began; and again at its end. There were such a lot of things in the world that even the cleverest collie could not make head or tail of! And most of these things were sad. That night, when the house was shut, Lad crept as usual into his cave under the piano. And he lay down with a sigh, his great head between his two absurdly small white forepaws. As a rule, before going to sleep for the night, Lad used to spend much time in licking those same snowy forepaws into shining cleanliness. The paws were his one gross vanity; and he wasted more than an hour a day in keeping them spotlessly white. But tonight he was too depressed to think of anything but the whimpering little dog imprisoned down in the tool-house. After a while, he fell asleep. A true watchdog sleeps with all his senses or the very edge of wakefulness. And when he wakens, he does not waken as do we humans;--yawningly, dazedly, drunk with slumber. At one moment he is sound asleep. At the next he is broad awake; with every faculty alert. So ever it was, with Lad. So it was with him, this night. An hour before dawn, he woke with sharp suddenness; and at once he was on his feet; tense, on guard. He did not know what had roused him. Yet, now that he was awake, two of his senses recorded something which banished from him all thought of further sleep. To his ears came a far-off muffled wail;--a wail which held more than unhappiness;--a wail which vibrated with real terror. And he knew the voice for Lady's. To his sensitive nostrils, through the intervening distance and the obstructing walls and windows, drifted a faint reek of smoke. Now, the smoke-smell, by itself, meant nothing whatever to Lad. All evening a trace of it had hung in the air; from the brush fire. And, in any case, this whiff was too slight to have emanated from the house or from any spot near the house. Yet, taken together with Lady's cry of fear--