“Ha! say ye so!” said Wanlock, kindling. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: ye run gey fast, I think, for innocence,” and he fixed a piercing gaze upon the wretch, who drew his hand across his throat and held it up to heaven. “But it is none of my affair—begone!” said Wanlock, and the gipsy clattered on his way. Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer’s end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still—but still ’twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished. A hand fell on the listener’s shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren. “Have you heard the news?” she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan and troubled aspect. He held up an arresting hand, and “Hush!” he said, “there is something curious in the wood. . . . Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the wood. . . . In the wood. . . . Did ye not . . . did ye not hear it?” and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through the columns of the trees. Again the cry rose, farther in the distance, burdened with a sense of desolation. “A bittern,” said Mirren; “it can only be a bittern.” “Do ye think I have not thought of that?” asked Wanlock. “Have ye ever heard a bittern boom at this time of the year, and in the middle of the day?” “I have heard it once or twice at night of late,” said his daughter. “It can only be a bittern, or some other creature maybe wounded. Do you know that The Peel has been plundered? Last night the strong-room was broken into.” “And robbed of the Mellish jewels?” broke in Wanlock, with exultant intuition. “Yes, and a great collection of antique gems entrusted to Mellish for the purpose of a monograph he was writing,” said the daughter. “A monograph?” asked Wanlock, still with eyes bent on the wood from which the dog returned indifferent. “It is a book on gems he has been busy writing.”