He hardly knew whether he had uttered the question aloud or not, and he stopped short. There was a pool close by, roughly fenced from the road, and fringed with ragged bushes on the further side. He sat down on the rail. "To-morrow," he said to himself, "nothing can happen before to-morrow." He took old Mr. Harding's letter from his pocket, and tried to read it in the moonlight, but a sudden gust caught it, and almost tore it out of his hand. He crushed the flapping paper together, put it back, and sat gazing at the black pool at his side, idly wondering whether it were deep enough to drown a man. It looked deep, he thought--as deep as the heavens, and a troubled gleam of moonlight rested on it every now and then. Harding knew well that he should never touch his life, yet he played that night with the fancy that in one of the darkened moments when the moon was hidden, it would not be difficult to drop below that shadowy surface, and effectually end the business, so that when the bright glance rested there again it should read nothing. He fancied the moon-beams travelling swiftly along the road, and not finding him, while he lay hidden under the water, with a clump of osiers bending and quivering above him in the windy night. "Why couldn't I do it?" he asked himself. "Why do I go on to meet my ill-luck? It is coming, I know, to play me some devil's trick--I feel it in the air, just as Mrs. Simmonds feels a change of the weather in her poor bones." So, idly jesting, he stooped and tossed a pebble into the brimming blackness, and as he did so he pictured to himself the groping hands, and the ugly strangling fight with death which the moon might chance to see, if it tore its veil aside too quickly. And, besides, there was the grim uncertainty of it. _What_ was under that dusky surface? "That's as you please to put it, I suppose," said Reynold, getting to his feet. "Eternity, or just a little black mud. And, by Jove, that railing's rather shaky!" He turned his face towards Mitchelhurst, laughing at his own folly. "Well, I'll take to-morrow and its chance of fortune--presentiments and all?"