What Van Cheele saw on this particular afternoon was, however, something far removed from his ordinary range of experience. On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that there was an almost tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness. It was an unexpected apparition, and Van Cheele found himself engaged in the novel process of thinking before he spoke. Where on earth could this wild-looking boy hail from? The miller’s wife had lost a child some two months ago, supposed to have been swept away by the mill-race, but that had been a mere baby, not a half-grown lad. “What are you doing there?” he demanded. “Obviously, sunning myself,” replied the boy. “Where do you live?” “Here, in these woods.” “You can’t live in the woods,” said Van Cheele. “They are very nice woods,” said the boy, with a touch of patronage in his voice. “But where do you sleep at night?” “I don’t sleep at night; that’s my busiest time.” Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with a problem that was eluding him. “What do you feed on?” he asked. “Flesh,” said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it. “Flesh! What Flesh?” “Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any; they’re usually too well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It’s quite two months since I tasted child-flesh.” Ignoring the chaffing nature of the last remark Van Cheele tried to draw the boy on the subject of possible poaching operations. “You’re talking rather through your hat when you speak of feeding on hares.” (Considering the nature of the boy’s toilet the simile was hardly an apt one.) “Our hillside hares aren’t easily caught.” “At night I hunt on four feet,” was the somewhat cryptic response. “I suppose you mean that you hunt with a dog?” hazarded Van Cheele. The boy rolled slowly over on to his back, and laughed a weird low laugh, that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a snarl. “I don’t fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company, especially at night.” Van Cheele began to feel that there was something positively uncanny about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued youngster. “I can’t have you staying in these woods,” he declared authoritatively. “I fancy you’d rather have me here than in your house,” said the boy. The prospect of this wild, nude animal in Van Cheele’s primly ordered house was certainly an alarming one. “If you don’t go. I shall have to make you,” said Van Cheele.