with all sorts of gruesome fancies.
Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone in
the great slab had become the bloodstain of men sacrificed by the Druids;
the glen was avoided by day and there were very few of the country people
round about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear of
anything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had been
accustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them.

It was a friend, places can become friends and, sometimes, most terrific
enemies.

The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and his
companion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall to
the library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as they
stood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they went
into the library, the door was closed, and Phyl came downstairs.

In the hall she slipped on a pair of goloshes over her thin shoes, put on
a cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefully
behind her.

To put it in her own words, she couldn't stand the house any longer. Not
till this very evening did she feel the great change that her father's
death had brought in her life, not till now did she fully know that her
past was dead as well as her father, and not till she had left the house
did the feeling come to her that Pinckney was to prove its undertaker.

There was something alike cold and fateful in the impression that this man
had made upon her, an extraordinary impression, for it would be impossible
to imagine anything further removed from the ideas of Coldness and Fate
than the idea of the cheerful and practical Pinckney. However, there it
was, her heart was chilled with the thought of him and the instinctive
knowledge that he was going to make a great alteration in her life.

She crossed the gravelled drive to the grass sward beyond. The night had
altered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blown
away by the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and the
air was balmy as the air of summer.

Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glittering
in the moonlight, then she struck across the grass now almost dried by the
wind.

Phyl had something of the night bird in her composition. She had often
been out long before dawn to pick up night lines in the river and she knew
the woods by dark as well as by day.