’Then you fool! you coward! I must take it for you!’ she hissed in her husky voice. She stooped, and thrust both her hands and arms deep into the kistvaen. ’Hush!’ whispered Charles, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, and covered the light with a flap of his mantle. She remained still for a minute with her arms buried in the crave. There was certainly a sound, a tramp of many feet, and the fall of horses’ hoofs, heard, then not heard, as they went over road or turf. ’There,’ whispered Mrs. Veale, and drew a box from the hole and placed it on Charles’s lap. As she did so, the mantleflap fell from the lantern, and the light shone over the box. Charles at once recognised Taverner Langford’s cash box, with the letter padlock. ’Ebal,’ whispered Mrs. Veale. ’A thousand pounds are yours.’ At that instant, loud and startling, close to the cairn sounded the blast of a horn, instantly responded to by the baying and yelping of dogs, by shouts, and screams, and cheers, and a tramp of rushing feet, and a crack of whips. The suddenness of the uproar, its unexpectedness, its weirdness, coming on Charles’s overwrought nerves, at the same moment that he saw himself unwillingly involved in a robbery, completely overcame him; he uttered a cry of horror, sprang to his feet, upset the money box, and leaped out of the cutting, swinging the lantern, with his wide mantle flapping about him. His foot tripped and he fell; he picked himself up and bounded into the road against a horse with rider, who was in the act of blowing a horn. Charles was too frightened and bewildered to remember anything about the hare hunt. He did not know where he was, what he was doing, against whom he had flung himself. The horse plunged, bounded aside, and cast his rider from his back. Charles stood with one hand to his head looking vacantly at the road and the prostrate figure in it. In another moment Mrs. Veale was at his elbow. ’What have you done?’ she gasped, ’You fool! what have you done?’ Charles had sufficiently recovered himself to understand what had taken place. ’It is the hare hunt,’ he said. ’Do you hear them? The dogs! This is—my God! it is Larry Nanspian. He is dead. I said I would break his neck, and I have done it. But I did not mean it. I did not intend to frighten the horse. I—I’—and he burst into tears. ’You are a fool,’ said Mrs. Veale angrily. ’What do you mean staying here?’ She took the horn from the prostrate Larry and blew it. ’Don’t let them turn and find you here by his dead body. If you will not go, I must, though I had no hand in killing him.’ She snatched the lantern from his hand and extinguished it. ’That ever I had to do with such an one as you! Be off, as you value your neck; do not stay. Be off! If you threatened Larry and have fulfilled your threat, who will believe that this was accident?’ Charles, who had been overcome by weakness for a moment, was nerved again by fear.