He turned back with the intention of taking as sudden leave of the place as he had made an entrance. He saw his dogs in front of him and called them. Before him lay the clean low fall of the meadow with the line of high hedge, and directly opposite him he could see the elms of his own park. He had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet away before he paused again and turned about to have one last look back at the enchanting place. As he stood thus, in Jimmy's property, he at first took it to be a trick of vision, for he stood perfectly rigid, peering back at the opening he had left not five minutes before. He leaned forwards, setting his eyeglass and staring at two figures who had come into the bowl and stood close by the big dial. He set his gun on the ground and leaned upon it. There was a cordial meeting; he could hear the voices but he could not distinguish their words, and during all the interview, which must have consumed some fifteen minutes, the Duke never stirred. Finally, and curiously enough it seemed a short time to him, they took leave of each other, the man going out of the forest by a different path, the woman slowly turning down the neat walk that led to the brick arch, and to the old house. Whether or not the Duke had at this moment the vaguest suspicion of her, suspicion of his friend or of his wife that did them wrong, he never had time or clearness to reflect or to ask himself. A dense blindness took his senses away from him. He put his hands out to steady himself in vain, and staggered. His dogs were at his feet, he fell over them, struggled to get his balance back and like a stricken tree went down. In his heavy fall on his gun it discharged, filling his upper arm and shoulder with a quantity of bird shot. The scattering pain, instead of finishing his faint, roused him with a sharp, ugly sting, and the rush of the warm, wet blood. He half picked himself up, and then, aware of the pain tearing his muscles and flesh, he fell back like a dog on his haunches. Through his confusion he still contrived to remember a little path, and inch by inch he dragged himself towards it. He pulled along over the leaves and russet paths of ground. His bare hand finally struck the bricks of the little walk and he could still know that he was wonderfully in the road. There was a cloud before his swimming eyes and his troubled mind; his face, pale as death, was lifted towards the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years before the present Duke.