He heard the scurrying of a rabbit--the swishing rush of a rat through the long grass, the flap and swoop of a bat hawking for moths--all the familiar sounds of the woodland and the creatures that roam by night, but no other sound did he hear. “The infernal skunk!” he muttered. “The infernal skunk! He has not even the manliness to claim her--he does not even take enough interest in her to see where she lives--to look up at the light in her window. He lets her go from him, and he will come to-morrow to try on his game of blackmail. I wish I had found him skulking here. That’s what I want--to feel my fingers on his throat--to throttle the soul out of him and send him down to...” and so forth. He completed his sentence and added to it several other phrases, none of which could be said actually to border on the sentimental. He stood there, a naked man among his woods, thirsting for a tussle with the one who was trying to take his woman from him. It was not until he had returned to the chair of civilization and had begun to think in the strain of fifty thousand years later, that he felt equal to contrasting this wretch’s bearing with that of the sailor man about whom his mother had read to him when he was a boy and she had thought it possible to impart to him a liking for the books that she liked--a sailor named Enoch Arden who had been cast away on a desert island--he had had great hopes of any story, even though written in poetry, which touched upon a man on a desert island. Enoch Arden returned to England to find his wife married to another man and quite happy, and he had been man enough to let her remain so. But Jack had not forgotten how that strong heroic soul had looked through the window of her new house the first thing on reaching the village. Ah, very different from this wretch--this infernal skunk who had preferred boozing in a bar at Framsby and then staggering upstairs at the “White Hart” to his bed. He had a huge contempt for the fellow who wouldn’t come to Overdean Manor Park to be throttled. But soon his train of thought took another trend. He knew that Priscilla was womanly, though not at all like other women, to whom the conventions of society are the breath of life, and the pronouncement of a Church the voice of God. She had proved to him in many ways--notably in regard to her marrying of him--that she was prepared to act in accordance with her own feeling of right and wrong without pausing to consult with anyone as to whether or not her feeling agreed with accepted conventions or accepted canons. She had refused to be guilty of the hypocrisy of wearing mourning for the man whom she hated; and she had ignored the convention which would have compelled her to allow at least a year to pass before marrying the man whom she loved.