Sometimes she stopped to rest her hand upon one of the pine trunks, apparently wrapt in thought; and Caleb Kent drew a long breath and told himself that she was thinking about him. Then she walked swiftly on again till she was at the very edge of the wood, where she stepped down into the sandy lane where he could not follow; but, quickly, almost as a squirrel, he mounted a tall spruce by its short, dense, ladder-like branches, to where, high up, he could still keep the girl in sight, elated by his adventure, and little thinking that she was asking herself whether it would be very difficult to kill Caleb Kent next time she met him in the woods, and so silence for ever a tongue whose utterances might ruin her beyond recovery. "Something to drink--something to drink," she kept on thinking. "To drink my health." Her eyes brightened, and her strange look told of an excitement within her which made every pulse throb and bound. "It would be so easy," she said to herself. But the feeling of elation passed away as she recalled the man's furtive, suspicious nature, and, in imagination, saw him fixing his keen eyes upon her, and asking her to drink first. Volume 2, Chapter V. THE SETTING OF A DOG'S STAR. The gentlemen were seated over their claret at the Hall, and the party had become very quiet. Sir John had been preaching on the subject of the value of a cross of the big, coarse, wool-bearing Lincolnshire sheep with the Southdown, as being likely to prove advantageous, the Lincolnshire sheep giving increased wool-bearing qualities, while the lamb would inherit the fine properties of its mother's mutton. At the words mutton and Southdown lamb, Rolph had pricked up his ears for a moment, since they had suggested under-done chops and cuts out of good haunches, with the gravy in grand supplies of stamina to an athlete; but the suggestion came at the wrong end of the dinner, and, with a yawn, the captain had wished Sir John and his pigs and sheep at Jericho, and begun thinking of his coming match with the Bayswater Stag for a hundred pounds a side, a race for which he told himself he was in training now, though his proceedings in the way of wines and foods would have horrified a trainer and frightened his backers into fits of despair. When Sir John had had his innings, the major began to talk about the translation of a paper by Fries, on the persistency of certain forms of parasitic fungi in the lower plants. To make himself a little more comprehendible to his companions, he kept introducing the word mushroom into his discourse, with the effect of bringing back Rolph's wandering attention, and rousing Sir John from the doze into which he was falling.