Click went the machine; round buzzed the wheels; out from George's eyes shot the sparkles. He jumped to his feet, his face red. “Is his cat!” he cried. “His Rose of Sharon! I see it! I see it! By Gad, I'll do it! Look here now--” “No, I will not,” the Professor said. “I do not wish to know anything about it. I hear my wife's step.” “I understand. All right. But don't tell a soul--not even Bill.” “I cannot tell, because I do not know. But I suspect it is something very funny,” and the Professor burst into a very deep “Ho! ho! ho!” “My dearest,” said Mrs. Wyvern at the door, “whatever can you be laughing at so loudly?” “Ho! ho! ho! ho!” boomed the Professor, belling like a bloodhound. “It is something very funny.” Mrs. Wyvern kissed the thin hairs on the top of his mighty head. “Dear William, I do trust it was not one of those painful stories of your young days.” George stayed to dinner. By nine he left the house. He did not make for home. Striking through lanes he climbed an ascending field, mounted a stile, and here, with an unseeing eye upon Herons' Holt twinkling its bedroom lights in the valley below, he smoked many pipes, brooding upon his scheme. III. It was not a melancholy process. Every now and again a crack of laughter jerked him; once he took his pipe from his mouth and put up a ringing peal of mirth that sent a brace of bunnies, flirting near his feet, wildly scampering for safety. Long he brooded.... A church clock gave him eleven. At ten he had been too deeply buried. Now his head was pushed clear from the burrow in which he had been working, and the sound caught his attention. No light now pricked Herons' Holt upon the dusky chart stretched beneath him. Its occupants were abed. “I'll do it to-night!” cried George. “I'll do it at once!” He drew on his pipe. A full cloud of smoke came. The pipe was well alight, and caution bidding him that it were well to bide a while so that sleep might more cosily warm the beds of the household, he determined that he would have out his last smoke as plotter: his next would be smoked as doer of the deed.