While he hesitated, however, the other ran down the bank, exclaiming, when he had come close to the margin--"Quick, quick, Master Harry, or ill may happen to her you love best!" Langford stayed not to ask himself who that was, but crossed the stream in a moment, demanding, "What do you mean, John?--what ill is likely to happen to----" He was about to add the name of her who had so recently and busily occupied his thoughts; but suddenly remembering himself, he stopped short, and the half-witted man burst into a laugh, exclaiming, "What, you won't say it, Master Harry? Well, come along with me; you will find I am right. I settled it all for you long ago, when I was an usher at Uppington School; and I said you should marry her, whether the old lord liked it or not. But come on! come on quickly! There are two of the foxes down there waiting by the dingle, just beyond the park gates. You know what foxes are, Master Harry? Well, you never thought to go fox-hunting this evening; but I call them foxes, because the law won't let me call them by any other name; and she has gone down to the old goody Hardy, the blind woman, to talk with her. Then she will have to read a chapter in the Bible, I warrant; so that she will be just coming back about this time, and then she will meet with the foxes; though, after all, they are waiting for Master Nicholas, the collector's clerk, I dare say; but they will never let her pass without inquiry." While he spoke these wild and rambling words, he walked on rapidly, followed by Langford, who was now seriously alarmed; for, although what his companion poured forth was vague and incoherent, yet there were indications in it of something being really wrong, and of some danger menacing Alice Herbert. He remarked, too, that the half-witted man, as he walked along, frequently grasped the cudgel that he carried, and lifted it up slightly, as if to strike: but it was in vain that Langford tried to gain any clearer notion of what was amiss, for his questions met with no direct reply, his companion answering them constantly by some vague and irrelevant matter, and only hurrying his pace. Thus they proceeded through the wood that topped the bank over the stream, across a part of the manor-park, to a spot where a belt of planting flanked the enclosed ground on the side furthest from the house and the village. It was separated by a high paling from a lane which ran along to some cottages at the foot of an upland common, and the lane itself was every here and there broken by a little irregular green, ornamented by high trees. The ground around, indeed, seemed to have been cut off from the park, and probably had been so in former times.