As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened. At rare intervals a hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a whiff from a summer garden. Once or twice it seemed to swing towards me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance. As time wore on I arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams, the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the mirage of sound. This was followed by the reactionary period of pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy rain, staring at a stone wall. Half an hour, or more, passed. "I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in the roasting of eggs." It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available. It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very gradually from a wall into a bank. I ascended the cleft, and presently found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of stairs. Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels." We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and legitimately, drawn forth the squeal. "Oh, gracious! The brute! I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed upon me. The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it. Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on. Her hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain. "Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued. "His horse jumped about like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps----!"