He wandered down to the Larch Gate, so called by the children because the larches stood there about the entrance of the wood like the porch of some forest temple. He halted, listening to the faint drip-drip of the trees, and as he listened, he thought; and his thoughts, like stones falling through a deep sea, sank down into the depths of him where so little light was that no words came to give them form or substance. Overhead, the blue lanes of the sky down which the sunlight had poured all day were slowly softening for the coming of the stars; and in himself the plastic depths, he felt, were a-stirring, as though some great change that he could not alter or control were about to take place in him. He was aware of an unwonted undercurrent of excitement in his blood. It seemed to him that there was ‘something afoot,’ although he had no evidence to warrant the suspicion. ‘Something’s up to-night,’ he murmured between the puffs of his pipe. ‘There’s something in the air!’ He blew a long whiff of smoke and watched it melt away over a bed of mignonette among the blue shadows where the dusk gathered beneath the ilex trees. There, for a moment, his eye followed it, and just as it sifted off into transparency he became aware with a start of surprise that behind the bushes something was moving. He looked closer. ‘It’s stopped,’ he muttered; ‘but only a second ago it was moving—moving parallel with myself.’ Paul was well accustomed to watching the motions of wild creatures in the forest; his eye was trained like the eye of an Indian. The gloom at first was too dense for anything to differentiate itself from their general mass, but after a short inspection his sight detected little bits of shadow that were lighter or darker than other little bits. The moving thing began to assume outline. ‘It’s a person!’ he decided. ‘It’s somebody watching—watching _me_!’ He took a step forward, and the figure likewise advanced, keeping even pace with him. He went faster, and the figure also went faster; it moved very silently, very softly, ‘like an Indian,’ he thought with admiration. Behind the Blue Summer-house, where they sometimes had tea on wet days, it disappeared. ‘There are no cattle-stealers, or timber-sneaks in this country,’ he reflected, ‘but there are burglars. Perhaps this is a burglar who knows Margaret is away and thinks—’ He had not time to finish what the burglar thought, for at that moment, at the top of the Long Walk, where the moonlight already lay in a patch, the figure suddenly dashed out at full speed from the cover of the bushes, and he beheld, not a burglar, but—a little girl in a blue frock with a broad white collar, and long, black spindle legs. ‘Nixie, my dear child!’ he exclaimed. ‘But aren’t you in bed?’