"You think what!" cried Sir John dropping his cigar. "I think I shall get married. I mean, when Glynne has gone." "I should like to catch you at it!" growled Sir John. "When Glynne goes you've got to stop with me." "Ah, well we shall see," said the major, whose eyes were fixed on the dark corner of the smoking-room, where he could see a fir glade with a pretty, bright little figure stooping over a ring of dark-coloured fungi--"we shall see. Glynne isn't married yet." The next morning, soon after breakfast, Rolph started off for a run, for he was training for an event, he said, the run taking him in the direction of the preserves about an hour later. He had gone for some distance along the path, but he leaped over a fence now and began to thread his way through a pine wood, where every step was over the thick grey needles; and as he walked he from time to time kicked over one of the bright red or speckled grey fungi which grew beneath the trees. He had about half a mile to go through this wood; the birch plantation and the low copse, and then through the grove in one of the openings of which, and surrounded by firs, stood the keeper's cottage. He pressed on through the fir wood, then across the birch plantation, where the partridges loved to hide, and the copse where the poachers knew the pheasants roosted on the uncut trees at the edge, but dared not go, because it was so near the keeper's cottage. Then on to Thoreby Wood, in and out among the bronze-red fir-tree trunks, under the dark green boughs, where the wind was always moaning, as if the sea shore was nigh, and the bed of needles silenced his footfalls, for the way was easy now. In another minute he would be out of the clearing, close to the cottage--at the back. "Why, there she is," he said to himself, with his heart giving a throb of satisfaction, as he saw before him a girl standing where the sun shone down through the opening where the cottage stood, and half threw up the figure as it rested one hand upon a tree trunk and leaned forward as if gazing out from the edge of the wood at something in the opening beyond. Rolph stopped short, to stand gazing at her admiringly. "What is she watching?" he said to himself, then, smiling as the explanation came. "Been feeding the pheasants," he thought. "She has thrown them some grain, and they have come out by the cottage." "Yes," he continued, "she is watching them feed, and is standing back so as not to scare them. Poor beggars! what a shame it seems to go and murder them after they have been reared at home and fed like this." He hesitated for a few moments, and then began to walk swiftly on, with hushed footsteps, toward where the figure stood, a hundred yards away.