Mrs. Brande, in her comfortable Mussouri dandy, Mr. Brande and Honor riding in advance, wound along the steep sides of forests--over passes and down ravines--travelling all the time through exquisite scenery in the clear hill air, where everything looks fresh, and the outlines of the trees and mountains are sharply defined against a cloudless sky. They halted each night at a different bungalow, marching about fifteen miles a day, and arriving at their resting-place early in the afternoon. On the third day, they came to a small out-of-the-way forest hut, which contained but a verandah, and three rooms, and two of these were already occupied. Such a state of affairs was unparalleled. The earlier arrivals were two engineers on survey, and a lady travelling alone. Mr. Brande looked excessively blank, he would have to rig up some kind of shelter in the verandah, for they had not brought tents, and whilst he was conferring with Nuddoo, Honor strolled away with her violin. She liked to play in solitary places--where all kinds of musical vagaries, and occasionally her own compositions, were unheard by mortal ears. She climbed the long sloping hill at the back of the bungalow, and sitting down below a great clump of bamboos and elephant grass, began to play soft melancholy music, that seemed to have exquisite words. She played away dreamily for quite three-quarters of an hour, now stopping to fill her eyes with the landscape--the rolling hills, the glitter of the sunset on a distant deep-set mountain tarn, the faint far-away line of the plains. At length it was time to be going; one star was out, and a thin silver moon had sailed into the sky. She played as a final “Home, Sweet Home,” a tribute to Merry Meetings and its inmates. As the last note died away, her trained and sensitive ear caught a faint sound in the tall grass and jungle behind her. Was it the sound of a human sigh? She started and glanced round. Just in time to see a thin hand withdrawn and the grass quiver all over, as something--somebody--crept stealthily away. Every scrap of colour had sunk from Honor’s face, as she stood gazing into the still gently waving grass. No; she had not the nerve to make a search. Common sense whispered, why should she? The place was extremely lonely, isolated, silent; there was already, or was it imagination, a weird and ghostly look about the hills and woods. In another moment Miss Gordon, violinist and coward, was running down hill towards the smoke of the bungalow, as fast as her pretty feet could carry her--and that was at a surprisingly rapid pace. She arrived breathless, just as the lamps were being carried into their room; but, for a wonder, she kept her adventure to herself. It might have been all fancy--and she knew Uncle P.’s stolid way of taking things to pieces!