By this time it was very dark, and the fog thicker than ever, so that they had never a thought of danger. Yet they had not been unobserved. Tom Pemberton, as ill-luck would have it, had been passing the coppice while the two labourers were after the rabbits, and had either heard their voices or the whistling, made more audible by the fog. Suspecting that poachers were at work, and always eager to do his fellow man an ill turn, Pemberton stopped his walk, and stole along the edge of the field till he reached the gate, where he crouched for his prey. In a few minutes the voices of the approaching labourers reached his ears, and being a coward he crawled along the ground, and lay down in the frozen ditch lest he should be seen, but still kept well within earshot. To his intense satisfaction he recognised one at least of the men by his voice, as they passed him, unconscious of his presence. Robins he could not be sure of, but he had only too good cause to recollect the voice of Wanless. The two were talking of the pleasure their families would have in eating stewed rabbit, and doubtless Pemberton chuckled to himself as he heard. But he had the prudence to keep quite still until the labourers got well beyond hearing. Then he arose and went on his mission of evil. The unsuspecting labourers trudged home in peace. Thomas with even a flicker of gladness at his heart, a flicker that deepened to a glow of thankfulness, when he reached his cottage and learned that the doctor had pronounced the child who had suffered most out of danger. She was the youngest but one, a little girl of four. Before her illness she had been a fair-haired, delicate-looking, but healthy child, with bright, engaging ways, and a sweet merry voice, a great favourite of her father's. Now she was thin and worn, and her lips had become dry and cracked with the fire that had burned and burned in her little body, till all its flesh was consumed. Night after night Thomas had come home, and, changing his wet clothes, had, after a hasty supper, gone up beside his little ones to watch and tend them in the early night, while the mother tried to snatch an hour or two's sleep. Through these weary weeks nothing had wrung his heart so keenly as the sore battle for life made by wee Sally. Hour after hour her little transparent feverish hands would clutch his nervously, as she lay panting in his arms, or wander pitifully about his weather-worn face, her burning touch causing him to shiver to the very marrow of his bones.