So, much lightened in his mind by his discovery, Hugh John took his way down the avenue. At the foot of it, and before he came to the locked white gate and the cottage of Betty, he turned aside through a copse, over a little green patch of sward on which his feet slid smooth as velvet. A hare sat on the edge of this, with her fore-feet in the air. She was for the moment so astonished at Hugh John's appearance that it was an appreciable period of time before she turned, and with a quick, sidelong rush disappeared into the wood. He could hear the soughing rush of the river below him, which took different keys according to the thickness of the tree copses which were folded about it; now singing gaily through the thin birches and rowans; anon humming more hoarsely through the alders; again rustling and whispering mysteriously through the grey shivery poplars; and, last of all, coming up, dull and sullen, through the heavy oak woods, whose broad leaves cover all noises underneath them as a blanket muffles speech. Hugh John skirted the river till he came to the stepping-stones, which he crossed with easy confidence. He knew them--high, low, Jack, and game, like the roofs of his father's outhouses. He could just as easily have gone across blindfold. Then he made his way over the wide, yellowish-grey spaces of the castle island, avoiding the copses of willow and dwarf birch, and the sandy-bottomed "bunkers," which ever and anon gleamed up before him like big tawny eyes out of the dusky grey-green of the short grass. After a little the walls of the old castle rose grimly before him, and he could hear the starlings scolding one another sleepily high up in the crevices. A black-cap piped wistfully among the sedges of the watermarsh. Hugh John had often heard that the ruin was haunted, and certainly he always held his breath as he passed it. But now he was on duty, and, if need had been, he would that night have descended to the deepest dungeon, and faced a full Banquo-board of blood-boltered ghosts. CHAPTER XI. ENEMY'S COUNTRY. He presently came to the wooden bridge and crossed it. He was now on the outskirts of the town, and in enemy's country. So, more from etiquette than precaution, he took the shelter of a wall, glided through a plantation, among the withy roots of which his foot presently caught in a brass "grin," or rabbit's snare. Hugh John grubbed it up gratefully and pocketed it. He had no objections whatever to spoiling the Egyptians. He was now in butcher Donnan's pastures, where many fore-doomed sheep, in all the bliss of ignorance, waited their turns to be made into mutton. Very anxiously Hugh John scrutinised each one. He wandered round and round till he had made certain that Donald was not there.