Everell, who had not once looked back, had passed from the old man’s view by turning from the road to rejoin the waiting poacher. Without a word, Tarby arose, relieved Everell of the cloak-bag, and led the way over the route by which they had come from the park. The palings were again removed and replaced, the stream was again crossed by means of the bars. The two entered the blackness of the glen, Tarby repossessing himself of his fowling-piece. By the time they had ascended to the general level of the park, the moon had risen, and, as they proceeded in a Northwesterly direction, the more open spaces, whether clothed in green sward or in bracken of autumnal brown, wore a beauty which Everell associated in his mind with the young lady not far away, and thus the silent woods and glades seemed to him a forest of enchantment. Tarby spoke only to call Everell’s attention to landmarks by which he might know the course again. He indicated the whereabouts of the keeper’s lodge without passing near it. They left the park by means of another such weak place in the barrier as had served them before, the poacher remarking that he preferred that kind of egress even when barred gates were near at hand. They now traversed a deserted bit of heath, covered with gorse, and plunged into a rough wood, much thicker and gloomier than the park behind them. Following a ditch, or bed of a dried-up stream, they emerged at last upon some partly clear, rugged land which rose gradually before them. This they ascended, and so came to a region of bare, rocky hills and deep wooded hollows. Tarby kept mainly to the hollows, until at last, having crossed a little ridge, he descended to a vale lying in the shape of a crescent, and seeming in the moonlight to be covered with timber; but a narrow patch of clearing ran diagonally across, watered by a little stream. Everell and his guide came into this clearing at the end by which the brook left it. Near the stream—so near, indeed, that they had barely room to walk between—was a thick mass of tall gorse bushes, threatening scratches to any intruder. Tarby turned in among these at a narrow opening, followed close by his wondering guest. In a moment Everell discovered that the bushes, instead of constituting a solid thicket, formed but a hollow circle, within which was a low cottage of timber and rough plaster. “Here us be,” said John Tarby, dropping bag and gun to respond to the leaping caresses of a mongrel hound that had sprung up from the door-stone. “He won’t hurt you, sir; ’tis a ’bedient animal. When I tells him to stop here, ’tis here he stops, and won’t come out even to meet me, unless I call or whistle.”