"You won't get the chance, my dear," said I. "But what do you think Sir Rupert meant by keeping Harry hidden away in Castle Angry?" "God knows," she answered with a little shudder. "He lied about him when he said he had gone away. Do you think he meant to keep him apart from you as long as he could?" "Perhaps," she answered. "Or, Esther, do you think he thought he would die? Why, he might as well have murdered him as kept him wasting away for want of care and treatment. Besides, before he grew so ill they must have detained him by force." Her hands closed and unclosed themselves spasmodically. "We will not talk about it," she said. "At least not now. Let God judge him." We were now at the entrance to the starved and ragged wood which grew on the lower slopes of Angry Mountain. "Let us wait here," she said, "for Maggie and the cart." And now that we were approaching the place of evil omen I saw that she had grown pale. CHAPTER XXVIII. OUT OF THE WEB. We were in the wood, and the boggy ground under our feet was giving way at every step. The wood seemed all bog except for the uneven pathway which gave, in dry weather, a solid resting place. On every side, under the tangled boughs, the ground was a brilliant treacherous green. No rabbits scutted from under our feet as in Brandon Woods, no squirrel ran lightly from bough to bough. We did not hear a bird chirp; all the naked boughs of the branches showed here and there a startling white surface, as though the tree had been stripped by lightning. A wind had got up, and the whole wood was creaking and groaning. The trees were many of them very old, and had flung themselves in strange unnatural postures; the knots and gnarls on the old oaks were like the grinning faces in gargoyles. It was easy to see why the country people were afraid of Angry Woods. Even in the cold light of morning the woods were eerie. In dusk they must look as if peopled by a multitude of mocking manikins, with here and there among them a towering white ghost. From the green and slimy bog, on which if you trod you might find a grave, a thousand gaily-coloured fungi sprang, and from the joints of the trees immense fairy mushrooms had burst out and thriven gigantically. "Quiet, quiet, Neddy!" I heard Mike O'Flaherty say to the donkey, whose little hoofs he was guiding upon the pathway. "If there's another downpour," he called out to us, "the path'll be washed back into the bog. We're not a day too soon, maybe, about our business." We answered him cheerfully over our shoulders; but the wind that had now sprung up was not conducive to conversation, let alone that the noise of the trees was like the shrieking and groaning of wretches under the knout. "'Twould be as well," I said to Esther, "that the bog should swallow it. This is a horrible place, this wood!" And she nodded for answer.