All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran--half deafened, yet relieved by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was inhuman--he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the sickly light--the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket, that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.” Surely the idle prediction was strangely verified. Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches, the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he could not stand it much longer. Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that stood at the close of a short vista of trunks. With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star glowed unwavering--a core of utter peace and quiet. CHAPTER VII. The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.