l oil.

To be brief, in spite of these exceptions, all was very still at the
Denes. The horse patrol had gone by, with the horse making noise enough
on the hard road to warn any burglarious person of his propinquity, and
he had passed three shabby-looking individuals, very drunk, and walking
right in the middle of the road as far as two were concerned, talking
together about what they had made on Tilborough racecourse the previous
day, while the third, being very tired and very tipsy, was--probably
from a most virtuous intention of walking off the superabundant spirit
he had imbibed--more than doubling the distance between Tilborough and
the next town, where there was a fair next day, by carefully walking in
zig-zags.

The patrol looked at him, and his horse avoided him, and all went on
their way, leaving the tree-bordered country road to its moonlit
solitude.

But there was another personage on his way from Tilborough races, having
a rest in a mossy piece of woodland half a mile from the Denes. He had
his coat very tightly buttoned up over his chest, and over two packets
of unsold race-cards, a packet over each breast, where with the fire of
a pipe of tobacco they helped to keep the traveller taking his al fresco
rest nice and warm.

"Bit damp, though," he said, after the horse patrol's movements had died
out, and he got up, shook himself, and went his way, to reappear in the
form of a silhouette against one of the big panes of glass in the French
window of the Denes drawing-room.

Faint moonlight is not good for observing colour. Pink looks black by
this illumination, whether it is on a man's nose or forms the tinting of
his old hunting-coat. But even faint moonlight delineates well the
shape of an old round-topped black velvet cap, and makes it look far
blacker than it does by day.

Such a cap is admirable for riding purposes, and must be of a most
convenient shape for anyone operating in a very tradesmanlike way upon
the drawing-room window by which the figure stood, with a putty-knife,
though an observer would probably have thought the hour unseasonable.

Still, when a window has been broken upon the ground floor, people in
the country are only too glad to get the repairing done at any time that
the glazier thinks proper to work, so that the weak spot in the domestic
defences may as soon as possible be repaired.

But in this case the stout plate glass window was not broken, and the
peculiarly handy kn