I don’t know how long passed; it may have been minutes, and seemed an hour. All the time a low snuffling reached me from the interior. The bitter wind had loosened my hair, and I caught its strands to my ears, to my eyes, and rocked in my saddle, trying to shut out everything. Presently a man came forth, to join the other by my side. “Garamighty, Job!” muttered he; “his honour be cap’en of the gang, and no mistake. You should see his larder.” “Ah! what’s in it?” asked the first. “Ten fat bucks, as I’m a saint,” answered the other. “We know now where the pick o’ the herd’s gone to, eh?” I sat up, listening. “What larder?” I asked faintly; for, indeed, I knew of none. The man touched his hat, half deferential, half impudent. “’Tis through the secret passage your ladyship, so to speak, opened to us--a locked door in the little cellar beyant.” I shrunk from him. “You said--what did you say was in it?” “What but a show of venison, miss--piled to the roof, one might say. He must ’a made a ryle living out o’ deer-stealing, by your leave.” He had--and that was the whole truth of the secret he had withheld from me! All the time I had been torturing my fears into madness, he had been abroad in the midnight woods, murdering, not men, but deer; in league with an ignoble crew for a paltry gain. This romance of a social ostracism revenging itself on a social hypocrisy: savage, melancholy, yielding to love only the troubled sweetness of its soul--what did it confess itself at last? O, glorious, to be first consul to a little republic of poachers! To vindicate one’s independence by picking the pockets of the king! It was all explained now--the whisperings, the draggings, the creaking carts--in that butchers’ shambles, the secret store of a gang of deer-stealers. He was no better than a cutpurse. In my bitter mortification, I could have wept tears of shame. “I am justified of my act,” I cried to myself. “Better that he should think me a traitor now, than live to curse me for withholding my hand when there was time and opportunity to save him!” Nevertheless, when they led him forth presently bound and quiet, I could not face his eyes, but cowered before the unspoken reproach and sorrow in them. He came up quite close to me. “It was your own fault,” I muttered in my hair. “Why would you never tell me?” “I was wrong,” he said, quite simply. “You must forgive me for what I have taken from you, Diana. If it is any comfort to you to know, the poor little unrealised bond between us reconciles me to this--and all that is to come.” I felt as if my heart broke then and there. I was conscious of the red earl watching us. The other turned to him, with a laugh like death’s. “Take your reversion, brother,” said he. “As for me, I am for the madhouse, I suppose.”