“Never! I’ve done with you. You ban’t a good man. Besides, you would have to wait for hours. I be very early for our meeting. Nicholas will not be there afore eleven o’clock.” “And if you never come home again, Minnie Merle?” “Then you may tell all men what you have heard to-night, an’ go an’ seek for me. If Nicholas knowed you were his enemy, he would shoot you like a dog. So be warned.” “And yet you cannot see that if he is married already, you are his worst enemy! He can’t marry you and get the money that way, so—” She turned and ran from him without another word, and he watched her sink into grey moonlight until the Moor swallowed her up. A dim spot a mile away on the night marked Wistman’s Wood; and from it, through the fitful noise of the river, an owl’s cry came faintly, like the sound of a wailing child. CHAPTER IV Elias sat upon a rock and so remained a long while with his head between his hands. Then he got up and walked slowly homeward; while Minnie Merle, despite the fact that she was far too early for her appointment, proceeded steadily toward Wistman’s Wood. Presently, with a light, sure foot, she entered the old forest and passed where auburn autumn foliage rustled under the wan light. The wind sighed here and there in the stunted timber, then died off and left the place breathless, awake, watching as it seemed. There was a familiar tree whose boughs, heavily draped with grey lichen and metallic-coloured mosses, made amongst them a comfortable sort of couch. The low branches scarcely sprung above the rocky earth, and many a deep cleft and cranny lay beneath the withered boles. Here the wood-rush flourished, and the briar, and the little corydalis shared sunny corners with the snake on summer days. Where Minnie now climbed, that her head might rise above the low crowns of the wood, ivy and whortleberry grew, and polypody ferns extended along the limbs of the tree. About each dwarf, bleared and hoary, moved festoons of ash-coloured lichen, like ghostly dryads grown old. The arms of the trees were bedded with centuries of decayed vegetation, their trunks were twisted into the shape of fossil beasts; yet life was strong in them; yearly they broke their amber buds; yearly they blossomed and bore fruit. Gazing about her and wondering from whence her mysterious lover would appear, Minnie was suddenly startled to see a huge creature moving in the night. It came toward her, magnified by the moon. Supposing it some wandering ox from the herds of half-wild cattle that roamed the Moor, she was glad of her elevated security; but the object proved a horse, and on it a man sat—the man she loved best in the world. Nicholas was also very early, and, well pleased to find it so, his sweetheart prepared to leap out of her refuge and run to him, when something made her hesitate and she waited a moment and watched her lover dismount.