She struggled out of bed and screamed for an attendant, but none came. She pressed an electric bell, which rang continuously in the night watchman's room; but he had run to the front of the house and was unlocking the front door, where a squad of willing men soon awaited Winter's instructions. For the Superintendent, after rushing to the telephone, had shouted an order to MacBain before he made off in the direction of the Quarry Wood. The one tocsin which exercises a dread significance in a peaceful and law-abiding English community at the present day struck a new and awful note in Hilton Fenley's brain. Fool that he was, why had he fought? Why was he flying? Had he brazened it out, the police would not have dared arrest him. His brain was as acute as the best of theirs. He could have evolved a theory of the crime as subtle as any detective's, and who so keen-witted as a son eager to avenge a father's murder? But he had thrown away a gambler's chance by a moment of frenzied struggle. He was doomed now. No plausible explanation would serve his need. He was hunted. The pack was after him. The fox had broken cover, and the hounds were in full cry. Whither should he go? He knew not. Still clutching the empty gun--for which he had not even one cartridge in his pockets--he made hopelessly for the open park. Already some glimmer of light showed that he was winning free of these accursed trees, which had stretched forth a thousand hands to tear his flesh and trip his uncertain feet. That way, at least, lay the world. In the wood he might have circled blindly until captured. Now a drawback of such roaring maelstroms of alarm and uncertainty is their knack of submerging earlier and less dramatic passages in the lives of those whom Fate drags into their sweeping currents. Lest, therefore, the strangely contrived meeting between Sylvia and her knight errant should be neglected by the chronicler, it is well to return to those two young people at the moment when Sylvia was declaring her unimpaired power of standing without support. Trenholme was disposed to take everything for the best in a magic world. "Whatever is, is right" is a doctrine which appeals to the artistic temperament, inasmuch as it blends fatalism and the action of Providence in proportions so admirably adjusted that no philosopher yet born has succeeded in reducing them to a formula. But Eve did not bite the apple in that spirit. It was forbidden: she wanted to know why. Sylvia's first thought was to discover a reasonable reason for Trenholme's presence. Of course, there was one that jumped to the eye, but it was too absurd to suppose that he had come to the tryst in obedience to the foolish vagaries which accounted for her own actions. She blushed to the nape of her neck at the conceit, which called for instant and severe repression, and her voice reflected the passing mood.