It was all the same this time, certainly, as when Challis was here in the autumn; all but a black swimming-bird, who had nodded a great deal, and surprised him, but not his companion--it was Athelstan Taylor--by diving suddenly and never coming up. The Rector had explained the ways of water hens, and that this slyboots was still under some floating rubbish, with her nose out for breath. Challis remembered wondering whether the whole of this class of birds was feminine, and watercocks only existed in connection with the Company. There was none this time--neither cock nor hen--and the open pastureland this side the beech-covert was all ablaze with buttercups in the high grass. For the fallow-deer found their pasture farther from the house, and never a little tail wagged on a dappled back in sight of Challis and Judith as they crossed the bridge--one slice of an elm-tree, with the outline on it of its trunk of a hundred years ago. "I suppose you know the legend of this bridge and the convict," said the lady, turning to the gentleman. "What legend of this bridge and what convict?" His inattention to his words was shown in the way he echoed them--sounds without meaning. "You must have heard it. When he was a boy--the convict--he was sent with a small package containing a ring to a lady at Tallack's Gate--one of the Cazenoves, I think it was--and on the way he thought it would be good fun to have a look inside his parcel. So he got the ring out, and, standing near this bridge, dropped it. He hunted for it in vain, and then, in terror of his mishap, ran away. I never quite understood it, but I suppose in those days they convicted people very easily...." "Much more than now! Was this chap convicted?" "Yes--and sent to Botany Bay. Twenty years after, having served his time, he came back to England, married, and lived to be an old man, but always under a ban. One day he came here, to this spot, with a grown-up daughter to whom he then told the whole tale for the first time. When he finished he said to her: 'I was standing just where you are when I dropped it.' She said, 'Here on the ground, or here on the bridge,' and touched the plank with her parasol. The point of it slipped into a knothole in the wood, and when she drew it out, something glittered on it. It was the ring." Challis was in the habit of inventing horrors for serials, and had had some success. But it chanced that he had never before heard this story--which, by the way, is told in connection with more than one locality in England--and he envied the master-hand that had fashioned it. He told in exchange the tale of the man who brought what he thought was his wife out of a house on fire, too black for recognition by his scorched and dazzled eyesight, and sat with his hand in hers till a strange voice came from the lips, and asked if the lady had been got out, naming his wife. "But your story is more probable," he in conclusion. "A man would know...."