ore he actually touched the iron
rail, a sharp, stinging pain shot across his back;--he drew one final
breath as he felt himself being lifted, lifted up into the air. The
horns had caught him just behind the shoulders!

There seemed to be no pain after the first shock. He rose high into the
air, while the bushes and spiked railing he knew so well sank out of
sight beneath him, dwindling curiously in size. At first he thought his
head must bump against the sky, but suddenly he stopped rising, and the
green earth rushed up as if it would strike him in the face. This meant
he was sinking again. The gate and railing flew by underneath him, and
the next second he fell with a crash upon the soft grass of the
lawn--upon the other side. He had been tossed over the gate into the
garden, and the bull could no longer reach him.

Before he became wholly unconscious, a composite picture, vivid in its
detail, engraved itself deeply, with exceeding swiftness, line by line,
upon the waxen tablets of his mind. In this picture the thrush that had
flown out of the ivy, the Empty House itself, and its horrible, pursuing
Inmate were all somehow curiously mingled together with the black wings
of the bull, and with his own sensation of rushing--flying
headlong--through space, as he rose and fell in a curve from the
creature's horns.

And behind it he was conscious that the real author of it all was
somewhere in the shadowy background, looking on as though to watch the
result of her unfortunate mistake. Miss Lake, surely, was not very far
away. He associated her with the horror of the Empty House as inevitably
as taste and smell join together in the memory of a certain food; and
the very last thought in his mind, as he sank away into the blackness of
unconsciousness, was a sort of bitter surprise that the governess had
not turned up to save him before it was actually too late.

Moreover, a certain sense of disappointment mingled with the terror of
the shock; for he was dimly aware that Miss Lake had not acted as
worthily as she might have done, and had not played the game as well as
might have been expected of her. And, somehow, it didn't all seem quite
fair.

CHAPTER IV

ON THE EDGE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS

Jimbo had fallen on his head. Inside that head lay the mass of highly
sensitive matter called the brain, on which were recorded, of course,
the impressions of everything that had yet come to him in life. A severe
shock, such as