The entrance to Auber Wood was now at hand; and as they reached its sinister outskirts, they both instinctively paused to take stock of their surroundings. The night was more sultry than ever. The leaves and grasses swayed with an almost imperceptible movement, as if stirred, not by the wind, but by the actual heavy breathing of the Earth herself, troubled and agitated in her planetary sleep. Sombre banks of clouds moved intermittently over the face of a blurred moon, and, out of the soil at their feet, rose up damp exotic odours, giving the whole valley the atmosphere of an enormous hot-house. It was one of those hushed, steamy nights, pregnant and listening, which the peculiar conditions of our English climate do not often produce, and which are for that very reason often quite startling in their emotional appeal. The path which the two men took, after once they had entered the wood, was one that led them through a gloomy tunnel of gigantic, overhanging laurel-bushes. All the chief entrances to Auber Wood were edged with these exotics. Some capricious eighteenth-century Seldom,--perhaps the one who raised the Tower of Pleasure on the site of the resting-place of the Holy Rood--had planted them there, and for more than a hundred years they had grown and multiplied. Auber Lake itself was the centre of a circumference of thick jungle-like brushwood which itself was overshadowed by high sloping hills. These hills, also heavily wooded, formed a sort of gigantic cup or basin, and the level expanse of undergrowth they enclosed was itself the margin of a yet deeper concavity, in the middle of which was the lake-bed. Mingling curiously with the more indigenous trees in this place were several unusual and alien importations. Some of these, like the huge laurels they were now passing under, belonged more properly to gardens than to woods. Others were of a still stranger and more foreign nature, and produced a very bizarre effect where they grew, as though one had suddenly come upon the circle of some heathen grove, in the midst of an English forest. Auber Lake was certainly a spot of an unusual character. Once it had been drained, and a large monolith, of the same stone as that produced by Leo’s Hill, had been discovered embedded in the mud. Traces were said to have been discerned upon this of ancient human carving, but local antiquarianism had contradicted this rumour. At least it may be said that nowhere else on the Romer estate, except perhaps in Nevilton churchyard, was the tawny-colored clay which bore so close a symbolic, if not a geological, relation to the famous yellow sandstone, more heavily and malignantly clinging, in its oozy consistence. Dangelis and Mr. Quincunx advanced slowly, and in profound silence, along their overshadowed path. An occasional wood-pigeon, disturbed in its roosting, flapped awkwardly through the branches; and far away, in another part of the wood, sounded at intervals the melancholy cry of a screech-owl.