"I seem to see him lying there, at the bottom of the Ravine," she said, staring as before into the fire. "I--wish--some of you would go and look for him." "Perhaps we had better. I'll make one. Who's this?" It was Tom Coney. His mother had sent him to see after me. I thought I'd tell him--keeping counsel about the dream--that Robert Ashton might have come to grief in the Ravine. "What kind of grief?" asked Tom. "Turned a summersault down the zigzag, and be lying with a leg broken." Tom's laugh displayed his small white teeth: the notion amused him excessively. "What else would you like to suppose, Johnny?" "At any rate, Jane thinks so." She turned round then, the tears in her eyes, and went up to Tom in an outburst of grief. It took him aback. "Tom! Tom! if no one goes to see after him, I think I must go myself. I cannot bear the suspense much longer!" "Why, Jenny girl, what has taken you?" _That_ had taken her. The fear that Robert Ashton might be lying disabled, or dead, in the Ravine. Tom Coney called Tod quietly out of the dining-room, and we started. Putting on our dark great-coats in silence, we went out at the back-door, which was nearest the Ravine. Jane came with us to the gate. I never saw eyes so eager as hers were, as she gazed across the snow in the moonlight. "Look here," said Tom, "we had better turn our trousers up." The expedition was not pleasant, I can assure you, especially the going down the zigzag. Jane was right about its being slippery: we had to hold on by the trees and bushes, and tread cautiously. When pretty near the bottom, Tod made a false step, and shot down into the snow. "Murder!" he roared out. "Any bones broken?" asked Tom Coney, who could hardly speak for laughing. Tod growled, and shied a handful of snow at him. But the slip brought home to us the probability of the fear about Robert Ashton. To slip from where Tod did was fun; to slip from the top of the opposite zigzag, quite another thing. The snow here at the bottom was up to our calves, and our black evening trousers got rolled up higher. The moonlight lay cold and white on the Ravine: the clustering trees, thick in summer, were leafless now. Had any fellow been gazing down from the top, we must have looked, to him, like three black-coated undertakers, gliding along to a funeral. "I'll tell you what," cried Tod: "if Ashton did lose his footing, he wouldn't come to such mortal grief. The depth of snow would save him." "I don't believe he did fall," said Tom Coney, stoutly. "Bob Ashton's as sure-footed as a hare. But for Jane's being so miserable, I'd have said, flatly, I wouldn't come out on any such wild-goose errand."