It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody near him in the wood--a figure moving among the trees at a little distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open. The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out, sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the covert. He received no reply, and the mist crept in between them. When it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to stumble, and fell with out-spread arms and without a sound into some unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there. Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then, quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the unknown entered into him, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of himself to get back to the path. As if through a dark atmosphere of foreboding and doom Hugh heard the whimpers strengthen to yells in all the wild and animal and mundane delight of hunting; he moved mechanically on, while the borders of existence became immeasurable about him, and his unhappiness stretched out into all futurity. There was a rustle in the undergrowth near him, and a fox slipped across the path and away among the trees towards the fence that bounded the wood. It was silver-grey, with black ears and paws, its eyes as it glanced at Hugh were like topazes, and seemed full of the cold lore of unearthly things. The thrill went again from Hugh’s heart to his throat, and died away in a sickly chill. “Damn it all!” he broke out suddenly, “what am I afraid of? I’m going to break my neck--that’s what it is--and the sooner the better.”