He had decided to risk the main road for their return. The augmentation of his party, the necessity of direct progress in that killing cold were his sufficient reasons. They rode past the house and awakened nothing but echoes from its stony walls. On the blind of the lighted tap fell the shadows from within of a group of men. No notice, however, was taken of the little cavalcade as it went silently by outside in the snow. “Betty, can you spell?” “Oh! yes.” “Spell this, then: l-o-v-e-r. What, you can’t? I must put you to school. See, l-o-v-e, and r for the little thumb that points at me. That is your lesson; and now here’s a prize for the quick scholar in the palm of her hand. Close it and keep it. You won’t? Then you shall return it to me in the dark by and by.” He hardly knew what nonsense he talked. A core of fire flickered in the numbness of his brain. He gave a whoop! like an excited boy presently as a herd of fallow deer--some twenty or thirty of them--broke from a covert and went beating down the road in front of them. “These must be some of friend David’s,” he cried. The poor beasts were smitten with the frost-fright--the desolation of despair that induces the last appeal of the lower to the higher animal. “If he who by his cunning can stultify all our traditional methods of self-protection,” they must argue, “be as full of resource as of foresight, and as full of noble clemency withal, it were well to submit ourselves to his mercy.” And so in strange times, man’s littleness is forced upon himself, because all his vaunted superiority cannot make food in a wilderness or flesh on starved bones; and he cries aloud and his voice returns to him as an empty echo. Then, “I must kill,” he says, “that there may be fewer mouths to feed”; and he kills, and fancies that he has mastered the problem of life. The deer cantered before the horsemen, grunting and shaking their heads. They had no action of escape, but seemed rather to have deliberately entrusted themselves, for safe passage to a greener land of hope, to this human convoy. They went down, a dusky bob of backs, into the hollow where was the entrance to “Delsrop”; and here, led by some attraction of the mightier race, they turned into the drive--for the gate had been left open--and trotted along it as far as the lawn, against the sheltering shrubberies of which they took refuge. And, upon the morrow, the most of them were discovered patiently waiting and snuffling about the stable-doors; and an empty coach-house was thrown open and scattered with hay for their benefit; and there, for a time at least, the trusting creatures found the help and protection they sought. Reaching the door of his house at last, Tuke swung a leg over his beast’s withers and, leaping to the ground, pulled Betty into his arms and landed her by his side. The other two, close upon him, had dismounted at the same moment. He called Dennis to him--the formal and authoritative master.